Trump Says US TikTok Buyer Lined Up, but Beijing Wants to Retain Algorithm

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Sep 17, 2025 - 09:52 Updated: Sep 17, 2025 - 02:14
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Trump Says US TikTok Buyer Lined Up, but Beijing Wants to Retain Algorithm

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President Donald Trump said on Sept. 16 that the United States has a buyer for TikTok and that a deal will preserve tens of billions of dollars in value for both China and the United States.

“We have a deal on TikTok. ... We have a group of very big companies that want to buy it,” Trump said at a press conference, without providing further details.

The president is set to have a call with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Friday to finalize details.

It is unclear whether China will retain a stake in the U.S. version of TikTok.

“We haven’t decided that, but it looks to me, and I’m speaking to President Xi on Friday, for confirmation of that,” Trump said in response to a question about the matter.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC on Sept. 16 that only a few details need to be ironed out.

“This deal wouldn’t be done without proper safeguards for U.S. national security,” Bessent said. “It seems as though we were also able to meet the Chinese interest.”

After U.S. and Chinese trade negotiators met this week in Madrid to continue talks, Chinese trade negotiator Wang Jingtao told reporters that negotiators reached a consensus that included licensing TikTok’s algorithm and other intellectual property rights, raising the possibility that the United States may not control the algorithm even after acquiring the popular social media app.

Bessent told reporters in Madrid that they discussed retaining “Chinese characteristics” of the app that Beijing cares about.

“They’re interested in Chinese characteristics of the app, which they think are soft power,” Bessent said. “We don’t care about Chinese characteristics; we care about national security.”

While researchers, advocates, and regulators have targeted TikTok over its algorithm, the law requiring its divestment deals solely with Chinese access to U.S. user data.

Since the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA) was signed into law last year by then-President Joe Biden, a deadline that would have TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, divest of TikTok or see the app go dark has been extended several times by Trump, who has said he is partial to the app as it has allowed him to communicate with young voters.

The deadline was extended again in June, setting a Sept. 17 deadline that Bessent said encouraged Chinese negotiators to agree to a framework for a TikTok deal.

He suggested the deadline will be extended again to provide Trump and Xi additional time to finalize the terms of the deal.

Bessent added that Trump has made it clear that he is willing to let TikTok cease operations if it cannot switch to U.S.-controlled ownership. When PAFACA was signed into law, ByteDance had sued, arguing that Chinese authorities would not allow it to sell the app under Chinese cyber laws. Chinese authorities updated export control laws to cover recommendation algorithms such as the one used by TikTok amid U.S. government scrutiny over the app, giving Beijing control over potential sales of such code.

Data Hungry Apps

The U.S. government zeroed in on TikTok in around 2018, after ByteDance acquired another music short-form video app with 200 million users and folded it into TikTok.

Cybersecurity company Quokka in 2024 flagged for the government the unusually vast amounts of data the app harvested, which presents a security risk even if the app developers or owners have no intention to do anything malicious with the data.

It found that apps by ByteDance were among the most data-hungry in the industry. Beyond TikTok, the parent company owns video editor app CapCut and lifestyle app Lemon8, as well as offers software development kits that see its code incorporated into thousands more apps with billions of downloads.

Chinese national security laws require entities operating in China to share data with the regime on demand, and the U.S. Intelligence Community was unconvinced that anything short of ByteDance’s divestment of the app would settle U.S. national security concerns.
This put the parties at a stalemate that continued from the Biden administration into the Trump administration.

Algorithm Concerns

Beyond national security concerns, TikTok and ByteDance have faced lawsuits, investigations, and criticism over the app’s algorithm.
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Parents worry that TikTok promotes harmful content to minors, including showing them videos about suicide, self-harm, and eating disorders. Families who have lost their children to suicide after they used the app warn that the dark side of this technology is not to be taken lightly. Authorities also allege illegal collection of minors’ data.
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Researchers and human rights advocates have concerns that the app amplifies and defends the Chinese communist regime’s human rights abuses. TikTok’s CEO has refused to acknowledge the regime’s persecution of Uyghurs, and multiple studies have found that the app censors content about the regime’s persecution of ethnic and religious minorities.
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Researchers from Rutgers University and the school’s Network Contagion Research Institute found that TikTok’s algorithms “actively suppress content critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) while simultaneously boosting pro-China propaganda and promoting distracting, irrelevant content.”
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Reuters contributed to this report. 
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