Trump, Bessent say U.S. and China have agreed on TikTok sale

 President Donald Trump said Monday that the United States and China have reached a deal over TikTok that would mark a shift in ownership for the wildly popular video app and avoid its nationwide ban.

Trump said he would speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday, adding that the agreement over the app, now owned by the Beijing-based tech giant ByteDance, would make “young people in our Country … very happy!”

The president provided no details about the agreement, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday said only that a “framework” of the deal was in place. Chinese government officials said Monday in a news conference that the two sides had reached a “basic consensus” and would work to “examine and approve” matters related to the deal.

ByteDance and TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Oracle, which could hold a stake as part of the deal, currently hosts Americans’ TikTok data on its servers in Texas and reviews the code for potential security flaws. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, the world’s richest person, is a close Trump ally. Oracle did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Bessent discussed TikTok with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng and other officials at a meeting this weekend in Spain, Treasury officials said in a statement. Bessent said that while both sides were “very close” on the TikTok deal, Chinese officials had made “aggressive asks” during the negotiations, which also touched more broadly on tariffs and trade.

Wang Jingtao, the deputy director of the Cyberspace Administration of China, said that the U.S. and China had engaged in “candid, in-depth and constructive” talks and that both sides had reached agreement “regarding our full respect for the will of the business as well as the law of the market.”

Li Chenggang, China’s international trade negotiator, said the country’s government had come to believe that the consensus was “in our mutual interest” and that a deal could be finalized “as long as the two sides follow this principle of mutual respect and equal consultation.”

A wide bipartisan majority of Congress passed a law signed by President Joe Biden last year requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok by Jan. 19, 2025, or face a ban, arguing the Chinese government could use the app to access Americans’ personal data or shape what they see online.

Since then, Trump has signed three consecutive executive orders directing his administration not to enforce the law, including one on his first day in office, despite the lack of legal authority for such a move to overrule a federal law upheld by the Supreme Court. The current deadline ends this month.

The Chinese officials offered no details related to the terms of the deal, though Jingtao referenced a license for use of TikTok’s recommendation algorithm, which fills users’ central “For You” feed with videos to watch. The White House earlier this year discussed an option that would let ByteDance retain control of the algorithm and lease it to a new American spin-off of TikTok, as The Washington Post first reported in April.

Critics have argued that arrangement would ensure that the algorithm could be misused to promote Chinese propaganda, one of the key concerns that animated the sale-or-ban law. The law also explicitly forbids a spun-off TikTok from maintaining any “operational relationship” with ByteDance related to the algorithm or data security, though it also grants the president authority to approve a divestiture if he determines the app is no longer subject to Chinese control.

Trump administration officials, led by Vice President JD Vance, have assumed an unusually active role in negotiating the private company’s potential sale. Trump tried and failed to ban TikTok during his first term but in recent years has become its biggest defender in Washington, saying that he believed he was a “big star” on the platform and that it helped him reach voters during the 2024 campaign.

A Vance spokesperson said in a statement Monday that Trump and Vance had “provided the leadership and foresight necessary to produce a framework deal that fulfills another campaign promise and saves TikTok.”

A proposal negotiated with help from the administration earlier this year called for TikTok to be spun off into a new U.S. entity, with ByteDance’s ownership shrinking to just below 20 percent — in line with the law’s requirements, which prohibit any companies from a “foreign adversary” country from owning more than a 20 percent stake.

Under that proposal, institutional investors who currently hold stakes in ByteDance — such as General Atlantic, Susquehanna International Group and KKR — would own 30 percent, while a consortium of new investors would own 50 percent, according to two people familiar with the deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The consortium then included groups such as the tech giant Oracle, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and the private equity firms Blackstone and Silver Lake, though the current status of their participation or interest is unclear.

The White House was hours away from announcing the proposal in April when the Chinese government rejected the deal, insisting that Trump first discuss the administration’s tariffs and trade policies that China had condemned as “unilateral bullying.”

ByteDance said in a statement then that the company had “been in discussion” with the U.S. but that “key matters” were still unresolved and that any agreement would be “subject to approval under Chinese law.”

China has for years criticized American lawmakers’ demands that ByteDance sell the app, saying they had resorted to “robbers’ logic” to take over China’s biggest social media hit on the global internet. ByteDance had noted in its failed legal attempts to resist a forced sale that the U.S. had never shown evidence of Chinese government involvement in its user data or recommendation algorithm.

The earlier proposal also drew criticism from some Republicans in Washington, who argued that Trump’s moves contradicted years of dramatic warnings from members of his party claiming that TikTok was “digital fentanyl” engineered by China to brainwash and dumb down American youth. Trump has routinely dismissed their concerns, saying in January that China probably has no interest in spying on “young kids watching crazy videos.”

Linking the corporate deal to broader trade negotiations has raised frustrations among lawmakers such as Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia), who told The Post in April that Trump appeared to be treating “national security as a tradable item.”

It’s unclear how the TikTok platform will change for users, if at all, as part of a deal. The company says the app is used by 170 million users in the United States.

Though it faces growing competition from short-video services such as Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, TikTok remains a cultural juggernaut and one of the biggest social media success stories of the past decade. Analysts have estimated that TikTok in the U.S. generated nearly $10 billion in revenue last year, largely from advertising, viewer tips and e-commerce sales.