US President Donald Trump said on Monday that a deal has been reached with China to allow TikTok to operate in America. It’s not yet official, though.
“The big Trade Meeting in Europe between the United States of America and China has gone VERY WELL! It will be concluding shortly,” Trump said Monday in a post on Truth Social.
“A deal was also reached on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our country very much wanted to save. They will be very happy! I will be speaking to President Xi on Friday.”
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, speaking to the press after the two-day meeting in Madrid, did not go into details but said the commercial framework deal will preserve TikTok’s "Chinese characteristics."
"They're interested in Chinese characteristics of the app, which they think are soft power. We don't care about Chinese characteristics. We care about national security," Bessent told reporters.
Bessent did not reveal if the apps parent company, ByteDance, will transfer control of TikTok’s underlying technology to Trump’s unnamed US buyer.
Earlier, a US government official told Reuters that the US government was ready to let the TikTok ban go ahead if a deal on divestiture by the Chinese company ByteDance couldn’t be reached.
That’s what the original law from last year said – that ByteDance had to sell or shut down TikTok in the US until January 2025.
However, Trump has already extended the deadline for the Chinese company three times, clearly unwilling to anger millions of American TikTok users.
While China hawks in Washington have long feared Beijing could harness TikTok to spy on, blackmail, or censor Americans, Trump has said he wants to save the app.
On Sunday, the US President said, “We’re negotiating TikTok right now. We may let it die, or we may, I don’t know, it depends, up to China, Trump told reporters. It doesn't matter too much. I’d like to do it for the kids.”
Progress on any deal has been slow, and Beijing requires approval before sharing TikTok’s prized algorithm with an American buyer.
Still, a deal had been in the works in the spring. It would have spun off TikTok’s US operations into a new US-based firm, majority-owned and operated by US investors.
China’s anti-monopoly regulator said on Monday that Nvidia, America’s leading chip maker, had violated the country’s antitrust law.
An agreement was put on hold after China indicated it would not approve it following Trump’s announcements of steep tariffs on Chinese goods.
Now, that same US official told Reuters that many technical aspects of the divestiture have been worked out, but the Chinese officials have tied any agreement to unrelated demands on US tariffs and technology restrictions.
It’s probably not an accident that China’s anti-monopoly regulator said on Monday that Nvidia, America’s leading chip maker, had violated the country’s antitrust law.
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