ByteDance building out artificial intelligence team in US

Published Fri, Feb 20, 2026 · 07:50 AM

[LOS ANGELES] Chinese tech giant ByteDance is hiring in the US for nearly 100 open roles within its artificial intelligence (AI) 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 favourable to leaders in Beijing. The company has said this has not 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 Intelligence. In February, ByteDance launched a new AI video generation model, Seedance 2.0, and ian mage 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 and Paramount Skydance sent ByteDance cease-and-desist letters, and the Motion Picture Association, which counts companies such as Netflix and Warner Bros Discovery among its members, demanded that ByteDance stop “unauthorised use of US copyrighted works on a massive scale”.

“ByteDance respects intellectual property rights and we have heard the concerns regarding Seedance 2.0,” a spokesperson said. “We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorised use of intellectual property and likeness by users.”

The company did not 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 are not 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 emphasised the importance of the adoption of American AI products abroad.

“What’s at stake is simple: a US-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.”

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, generalisable models that drive breakthroughs in biology and drug discovery”, according to one current job listing.

Health care and drug discovery areas are 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 subsidising 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. BLOOMBERG