The United States will have control over TikTok’s algorithm in the acquisition of the social media platform’s US operations, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Saturday.
“We are 100% confident that a deal is done. Now that deal just needs to be signed, and the president’s team is working with their Chinese counterparts to do just that,” Leavitt said on Fox News.
She added that the deal will likely be signed “in the coming days,” adding that data and privacy for the app in the United States will be led by tech giant Oracle.
Leavitt said Americans would hold six of the seven TikTok board seats.
Leavitt’s comments come after President Donald Trump on Friday said he and China’s leader Xi Jinping had “a very productive call” and made progress to finalize a deal that would sell most of TikTok’s US assets to American investors.
In April 2024, Congress passed a bill that banned the popular social media app, with the caveat that TikTok could continue US operations if it sold about 80% of its assets to American investors. TikTok briefly went dark in the United States on January 18, the day before the Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act went into effect and two days before Trump took office.
But TikTok continued to operate with Trump granting four extensions to delay the shutdown and give his administration more time to broker a deal.
The app boasts around 170 million US users, many of them young people — a contingent that offered more support to the Republican presidential candidate in the 2024 election than that segment of the population has in previous elections, according to Pew Research.
Leavitt confirmed that the deal would be led by a consortium of investors, including Oracle, Andreesen Horowitz and Silver Lake. That could leave the remaining 20% to be held by Chinese investors.
The algorithm, which determines what users see on their “For You” feeds, is considered “the special sauce” that has made the app so popular and so difficult for competitors to recreate. ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, had said it was not considering selling the app with or without the algorithm.
Talks between the United States and China had reached a standstill about a potential TikTok deal after Trump imposed massive tariffs on Chinese goods in April. After tariffs were brought lower and talks between the US and China resumed, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said both Trump and Xi expressed interest in re-engaging on TikTok discussions, though key details needed to be ironed out, including addressing US national security concerns.
The expected deal laid the groundwork for the first in-person meeting between Trump and Xi since Trump returned to office. The leaders are expected to meet next month at the APEC Summit in South Korea.