A senior White House official announced on Saturday that a new agreement on TikTok’s U.S. operations includes a provision for China’s ByteDance to select one of seven board members for the new entity, while the other six seats will be held by Americans.
President Donald Trump is working to prevent the short-video app, which has 170 million U.S. users, from being banned. This follows a 2024 law passed by Congress that mandated a shutdown by January 2025 unless its U.S. assets were sold by its owner, ByteDance. Trump has extended the enforcement deadline until mid-December to facilitate a deal that would separate TikTok’s U.S. assets, secure American investors, and meet the legal requirement for a full divestiture.
This week’s progress marks a rare breakthrough in months of tense negotiations between the world’s two largest economies, which have been engaged in 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 plan to meet in person in six weeks. However, Beijing’s official statements have not yet clarified the extent of the progress.
The details of the agreement, as described by the White House official, largely align with recent reports from Reuters and other news outlets. The official noted that Trump would extend the current enforcement pause on the 2024 law for an additional 120 days, pushing the next deadline to April.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, lawmakers are expected to seek further details on how the deal will function. Representative Frank Pallone, a Democrat, stated, “The devil will be in the details. We cannot allow China to continue 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 form, will satisfy the congressional requirement for a full divestiture.
The official also confirmed that all data on American users would be stored on U.S. cloud computing infrastructure managed by the American software firm Oracle. The TikTok algorithm “will be secured, retrained and operated in the United States outside of ByteDance’s control,” the official said. The algorithm, which U.S. officials previously warned could be used by China to manipulate content for Americans, “will be retrained from the ground up – reviewed and analysed under US supervision with US data that will not be shared outside of the United States.”
The official added that TikTok’s U.S. assets would be majority-owned by American investors and operated by a U.S.-based board of directors with national security and cybersecurity expertise. ByteDance, whose shareholders include Susquehanna International Group, General Atlantic, and KKR, would retain less than 20% of the stock in the joint venture.
