ByteDance expands US AI team with 100 roles as national security concerns persist

ByteDance Building Out Artificial Intelligence Team in US

Chinese tech giant ByteDance Ltd. is hiring in the US for nearly 100 open roles within its artificial intelligence division, an effort to compete with the world's leading US-based AI companies despite years of national security concerns from American lawmakers and regulators. The positions, which are listed on ByteDance's career page, are for Seed, its AI team which was established in 2023 and now has labs across the US, Singapore and China. The open roles highlight various job responsibilities, including "producing international data" for ByteDance's large language models; advancing its popular text, image and video generation tools; doing research to develop human-like AI; and building science models to help the company pursue drug discovery and design, according to the postings. Beijing-based ByteDance's US hiring push comes after it announced a long-awaited deal to sell parts of its US TikTok business to non-Chinese owners -- a move intended to address US national security concerns that have loomed large over the company for more than half a decade. Lawmakers worried that ByteDance could use TikTok to collect valuable data on American citizens, or use the app's content recommendation algorithm to push narratives favorable to leaders in Beijing. The company has said this hasn't happened, nor would it. While ByteDance's ties to TikTok make it best known in the US as a social media company, it is also a dominant AI company, and a threat to American AI pioneers. ByteDance's chatbot app Doubao -- akin to OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic PBC's Claude and Google's Gemini -- was China's most-downloaded AI chatbot for most of 2025, according to Bloomberg IntelligenceBloomberg Terminal. In February, ByteDance launched a new AI video generation model, Seedance 2.0, and image generation model, Seedream 5.0. Those launches, just weeks after the TikTok deal closed, have thrust ByteDance back into the spotlight in the US. Hollywood heavyweights have accused ByteDance of stealing intellectual property with Seedance, which has already been used to spin up viral alternate endings to popular television shows and fake movie scenes with A-list actors. Within days of Seedance's availability, Walt Disney Co. and Paramount Skydance Corp. sent ByteDance cease-and-desist letters, and the Motion Picture Association -- which counts companies like Netflix Inc. and Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. among its members -- demanded that ByteDance stop "unauthorized use of U.S. copyrighted works on a massive scale." "ByteDance respects intellectual property rights and we have heard the concerns regarding Seedance 2.0," a spokesperson wrote in an email. "We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property and likeness by users." The company didn't respond to questions about the AI job postings. ByteDance's growing AI presence in the US coincides with broader concerns from lawmakers that China is an imminent threat to US AI dominance. Though Chinese and American AI products aren't always available in the same markets, some officials worry that losing ground in the AI race will give China geopolitical leverage and military advantages that pose national security risks. In other cases, Chinese products are available in the US while American offerings are blocked in China, allowing Chinese companies to seize market share, ingest data and shape culture and discourse in ways their American rivals can't. The Trump administration has also emphasized the importance of adoption of American AI products abroad. "What's at stake is simple: a U.S.-led future that benefits the free world, or a China-led AI order that reshapes the global system in line with their authoritarian values," US Senator Pete Ricketts, a Republican from Nebraska, said in December at a hearing on the US-China AI race. "The risk could not be higher. This race will be won by whoever attracts the best talent, wields the best chips, and trains the best algorithms." Get the Tech Newsletter bundle. Get the Tech Newsletter bundle. Get the Tech Newsletter bundle. Bloomberg's subscriber-only tech newsletters, and full access to all the articles they feature. Bloomberg's subscriber-only tech newsletters, and full access to all the articles they feature. Bloomberg's subscriber-only tech newsletters, and full access to all the articles they feature. Bloomberg may send me offers and promotions. Plus Signed UpPlus Sign UpPlus Sign Up By submitting my information, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. Some see ByteDance's rise in the AI world as one part of this issue. "ByteDance has access to vast amounts of compute, data, and capital, plus the explicit support of the CCP," said Aaron Bartnick, a former Biden White House tech policy official, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. "It has all the ingredients to be an AI powerhouse, so it shouldn't be a surprise to American policymakers or companies that it is now emerging as one." The ByteDance Seed team is hiring in San Jose, California, Los Angeles and Seattle, where TikTok also has large offices. ByteDance is also launching the Seed Edge Research Initiative, which "focuses on developing general intelligence models -- models that possess human-like learning abilities, interaction capabilities, and tool-use proficiency," according to one posting. ByteDance has also been ramping up its science-focused efforts, hiring US talent with backgrounds in biology, physics and chemistry "to develop open, high-precision, generalizable models that drive breakthroughs in biology and drug discovery," according to one current job listing. Health care and drug discovery areas where American AI competitors are also investing heavily. OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman announced OpenAI for Healthcare in January, and said earlier this month that his company may consider investing in or subsidizing firms that use OpenAI's technology for drug discovery. Anthropic, which recently announced Claude for Life Sciences and Claude for Healthcare, is also supporting uses of its AI aimed at accelerating drug discovery and development.

TikTik Owner ByteDance Looks to Build Up US AI Team | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. That's according to a report Thursday (Feb. 19) from Bloomberg News, which said this is an effort by the Chinese tech giant to compete with American AI companies despite ongoing national security fears from the U.S. government. The report cites listings on the company's career page, with jobs involving things like "producing international data" for ByteDance's large language models and conducting research to create human-like AI. As the report noted, the hiring campaign follows the announcement that ByteDance had struck a deal to sell parts of its U.S. stake in social media platform TikTok to non-Chinese owners. That sale was aimed at addressing concerns that ByteDance could use TikTok to collect data on Americans or disseminate information favorable to the Chinese government. The company has denied those things have or would happen. Outside of its social media business, ByteDance is also a major player in the AI space, the report added, with its Doubao chatbot the most downloaded AI service of its kind among Chinese users last year. The company's Seedance tool has also caught the attention of Hollywood, with studios sending cease-and-desist letters after Seedance was used to create alternate endings to TV shows and fake movie scenes featuring A-list actors. A spokesperson for ByteDance told Bloomberg the company respects intellectual property rights and is working on boosting its safeguards to prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property and likenesses. As PYMNTS wrote last week, the rise of Seedance 2.0 ties into a larger ecosystem pivot toward multimodal AI, where the ability to seamlessly combine text, visual and auditory outputs is becoming a key differentiator among top artificial intelligence models. "While text-centric systems such as OpenAI's ChatGPT remain widely used, video and multimedia generation represent a rapidly growing frontier with implications for creative industries and commercial content workflows," that report said. OpenAI introduced its own text-to-video model, Sora, created to generate realistic video clips from written prompts. Sora can create minute-long, high-fidelity scenes with consistent characters and complex motion, a sign that video generation is shifting from experimental novelty to production-grade capability. At the same time, as covered here, social media platforms are reconfiguring their products to deal with the surge in AI-generated content. "Companies including Meta and Pinterest have begun overhauling feeds and labeling systems to more clearly distinguish between human-created and AI-generated posts, reflecting mounting pressure around transparency and trust," the report added.