A senior White House official said on Saturday that a US-China agreement on TikTok’s U.S. operations will allow China’s ByteDance to choose one of seven board members for the new entity, with Americans holding the six other seats.
President Donald Trump is trying to prevent the short-video app with 170 million U.S. users from being banned. This follows a 2024 law passed by Congress that ordered the app to be shut down by January 2025 if its U.S. assets were not sold by its owner, ByteDance. Trump has delayed enforcement of the law until mid-December as efforts continue to separate TikTok’s U.S. assets from the global platform and secure American investors to ensure the new ownership qualifies as a full divestiture under the 2024 law.
This week’s progress toward a deal marks a rare breakthrough in the months-long talks between the world’s two largest economies, who have been trying to defuse a wide-ranging trade war that has unsettled global markets.
Trump said on Friday that he and Chinese President Xi Jinping had made progress on a TikTok agreement during a phone call and would meet face-to-face in six weeks. However, Beijing’s statements have not clarified the extent of this progress.
Also Read: US, China strike deal to keep TikTok operating in America
Details of the agreement, as outlined by the senior White House official, largely align with recent reporting by Reuters and other news outlets. The official said Trump would extend the latest pause in the law’s enforcement for an additional 120 days, suggesting the next deadline for a finalized agreement would be in April. TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lawmakers, however, will want a thorough explanation of how the deal will work. Representative Frank Pallone, a Democrat, said, “The devil will be in the details. We cannot allow China continued access to massive amounts of Americans’ personal data, and we cannot allow Trump to hand TikTok over to his tech bro buddies and turn it into a MAGA mouthpiece. Period.”
It remains unclear if the deal in its current state will qualify as a full divestiture as required by Congress under the 2024 law. Trump has credited TikTok with helping him win re-election last year and has 15 million followers on his personal account. The White House also launched an official TikTok account last month.
As expected, the agreement described by the official will require that all data on American users be stored on U.S. cloud computing infrastructure run by U.S. software firm Oracle.
Also Read: US, China reach framework TikTok deal ahead of Trump-Xi call
The official also said the TikTok algorithm “will be secured, retrained and operated in the United States outside of ByteDance’s control.” The official added, “TikTok’s content-recommendation algorithm will be retrained from the ground up – reviewed and analyzed under US supervision with US data that will not be shared outside of the United States.” This is a crucial point because U.S. officials had warned in recent years that the algorithm could be used by China to manipulate what Americans see on social media. Reuters and others reported this week that the algorithm could be licensed from ByteDance.
The official said U.S. users would still be able to use TikTok to interact with content from around the world. The U.S. assets of TikTok would be majority-owned by American investors and operated in the United States by a board of directors with national security and cybersecurity credentials, the official added. ByteDance’s current shareholders include Susquehanna International Group, General Atlantic, and KKR. ByteDance would hold less than 20% of the stock of a joint venture controlling TikTok’s U.S. operations, the official said.
