Los Angeles. The new Chinese AI model, 'Sora-2.0', is causing a stir in Hollywood. Developed by TikTok creator ByteDance, this AI model can generate cinema-quality videos, complete with sound effects and dialogue, based on simple instructions. This raises the possibility of a major transformation in the entertainment industry.
Several Sora clips featuring famous characters like Spider-Man and Deadpool have gone viral. Major studios like Disney and Paramount have accused ByteDance of copyright infringement, but the impact of this technology goes deeper than legal matters.
- What is Sora and why is it causing a stir?
Sora was first released in June 2025, but its second version has created a huge buzz in the market. Jan-Willem Blom of VideoStat says, 'For the first time, I don't feel like this is good for AI. Instead, it feels like it came straight from a real production pipeline.'
He notes that while Western AI video models have progressed in processing user instructions to create excellent images, Sora appears to have put everything together.
Like other AI tools—such as Midjourney and OpenAI's Sora—Sora can create videos from short text prompts. In some cases, a single instruction has been seen to produce high-quality video.
According to AI ethics researcher Margaret Mitchell, its ability to combine text, visuals, and audio into a single system is particularly impressive.
Sora's impact has been measured by an unusual benchmark: how well it can depict Will Smith eating noodles. Sora not only creates a realistic video of Smith eating noodles but also generated the viral video of Smith fighting a noodle monster—which looks like a big-budget movie.
Many industry experts and filmmakers believe Sora marks a new chapter in video-generating technology development.
David Kwok, who runs animation studio Tiny Island Productions in Singapore, says, 'The complex action scenes Sora is producing look more realistic than its competitors. It looks like it was assisted by an expert cinematographer or director of photography on action films.'
- Challenges
Sora is embroiled in copyright issues, a growing challenge in the age of AI. Experts warn that AI companies are prioritizing technology over people as they build powerful tools and use data without payment.
Major Hollywood groups have objected to Sora using copyrighted characters like Spider-Man and Darth Vader. Disney and Paramount have sent letters demanding that Sora stop using their content. Japan is also investigating ByteDance for alleged copyright infringement after AI videos of popular anime characters went viral.
ByteDance stated it is taking steps to strengthen current security measures. This is not unique to the Chinese company.
In 2023, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of using its articles without permission to train their AI models. Reddit sued Perplexity last year for allegedly scraping user posts illegally. Disney also expressed similar concerns to Google.
Mitchell says, 'Clearly labeling content to prevent deception and building public trust in AI is much more important than 'cool-looking' videos.'
'This is why developers must build systems that manage licensing and payment, and provide clear mechanisms to contest misuse,' she adds. For example, Disney signed a $1 billion deal with OpenAI's Sora to use characters from Star Wars, Pixar, and Marvel.
Shannan Kohne, a computing researcher at the University of Melbourne, says, 'The developers of Sora were aware of potential copyright issues surrounding the use of Western intellectual property and took the risk anyway.'
'There is plenty of room to strategically bend the rules, break the rules for a while, and gain marketing impact,' she adds.
Meanwhile, for smaller firms, Sora is proving very useful. Kwok of Tiny Island Productions in Singapore says that AI of this quality will allow companies like his to create films that would otherwise be too expensive for them to afford.
He cited the example of Asia's growing short videos and micro-dramas which typically run on small budgets—about $140,000 for 80 episodes, each less than two minutes long.
These productions were limited to romance or family drama to keep costs down because they required fewer visual effects. But now AI can 'elevate low-budget productions into more ambitious genres like sci-fi, period drama, and, now, action,' says Kwok.
- Is China pulling ahead?
Sora has once again brought Chinese technology into the spotlight. Kohne says, 'This indicates that Chinese models are at least catching up to the state of the art available. If ByteDance can produce this suddenly, what other models do Chinese companies have?'
Last year, another Chinese AI model, DeepSeek, made waves globally with its low-cost large language model. It quickly surpassed ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app in Apple's US store.
Beijing has placed AI and robotics at the center of its economic strategy over the past year, investing heavily in advanced computer chip production, automation, and generative AI as it vies for a technological edge with the US.
While Sora 2.0 was making headlines, other major Chinese firms made low-profile rollouts of new generative AI tools before the Lunar New Year holiday. 'The Spring Festival is increasingly becoming an 'AI holiday,' as firms time launches for when millions of people are at home and experimenting with new apps,' wrote analyst Bill Bishop in his newsletter.
He predicts 2026 could be a significant point for mass AI adoption in China—not just chatbots, but AI agents handling transactions, coding tools integrated into daily work, and video creators regularly using AI.
