The United States and China may have agreed on a deal to prevent the social platform TikTok from being banned in the US—if you take US president Donald Trump’s word for it. After a long-awaited call between Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping on Friday, Trump announced victory on Truth Social: “The call was a very good one, we will be speaking again by phone, appreciate the TikTok approval, and both look forward to meeting at APEC!”
As for any details on the agreement, good luck. Specifics around the shape and scope of the deal remain largely unclear as of Friday afternoon. More importantly, there’s been no official word from the Chinese government on whether it has agreed to the terms.
“China’s position on the TikTok issue is clear: The Chinese government respects the wishes of the company in question and would be happy to see productive commercial negotiations in keeping with market rules lead to a solution that complies with China’s laws and regulations and takes into account the interests of both sides,” says China’s official readout of the call, which was posted on the website of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The deal being proposed by the Trump administration involves Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz leading a group of investors to take a roughly 80 percent stake in TikTok’s US operation, according to The Wall Street Journal. Oracle, which has worked closely with TikTok since 2020, would continue to store US user data on its domestic servers. The new, US-controlled entity would use licensed technology from ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to create a similar content recommendation algorithm to the one TikTok currently employs.
“Any details of the TikTok framework are pure speculation unless they are announced by this administration,” a White House spokesperson tells WIRED.
Key questions remain, for example, on how much control Oracle and ByteDance would each have on TikTok’s US data and algorithm. Trump’s Truth Social post suggests that he will meet with Xi again at the APEC Summit in South Korea in late October, meaning details could emerge after that.
On Thursday, during a joint press conference with UK prime minister Keir Starmer, Trump boasted that the US should receive a “tremendous fee plus” for brokering the TikTok deal. It’s not clear what fee he’s referring to—WIRED asked multiple White House officials, but none replied.
The White House also credited Vice President JD Vance—the top conduit between Silicon Valley billionaires and the West Wing—for playing a key role in the deal. A White House official told WIRED that Sean Cooksey, an adviser to Vance, was “at the forefront” of negotiations on behalf of the vice president.
US efforts to ban TikTok started during Trump’s first term in 2020. Months before he left office, Trump threatened to ban TikTok and another Chinese app WeChat. The Biden administration rescinded Trump’s executive orders on the topic but continued to scrutinize TikTok. The US congress eventually passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications (PAFACA) Act in April 2024. This gave TikTok two options: divest from its Chinese ownership before January 19, 2025, or risk a federal ban.