Donald Trump Is Saying There’s a TikTok Deal. China Isn’t

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.

ByteDance posted a statement on Chinese social media platforms: “ByteDance will advance relevant work in accordance with the requirements of Chinese law, so that TikTok’s US operations can continue to serve the broad American user base well.” ByteDance and Oracle did not respond to WIRED's request for comment.

“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.

The app briefly went dark in the US ahead of the deadline, then reappeared on app stores less than 24 hours later and resumed services for US users.

Since Trump returned to power, Washington’s stance on TikTok appears to have shifted. Trump has become a steadfast advocate for saving the app, which he credited with helping him win the support of young voters. He has repeatedly extended the deadline set by the PAFACA Act, most recently to December 16, 2025, which some experts have criticized as illegal.

The deal that is reportedly being proposed by the Trump administration could meet the requirements set by the PAFACA Act, says Alan Rozenshtein, an associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School. But the fact remains that the deadline has been extended multiple times and American companies like Oracle and Apple have not paid fines for continuing to service the app.

“The way the law was written, the companies were liable for doing business with TikTok, up to $5,000 per US user. So if there are 170 million TikTok users [in the US], and they all used the platform in the last nine months, and each of these platforms and each of these companies has accrued potentially up to nearly $1 trillion in liability,” Rozenshtein claims. He notes that it’s unlikely the Trump administration will collect that fine.

Some experts in Washington believe the deal does not solve the perceived national security issues that sparked talk of a ban in the first place. “In plain terms, ownership change without technical separation is a violation of the law,” says Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a DC-based think tank. He compares the deal to a “joint custody” rather than the “divorce” that the PAFACA Act required.

The Chinese government has stressed in recent statements that the deal will include concessions from the US on non-TikTok issues, such as barriers to cross-border investment. “The US side needs to provide an open, fair and non-discriminatory environment for Chinese investors,” the Chinese readout of the call between Trump and Xi says.

If Beijing exchanges the TikTok deal for better trade terms, ByteDance and its original investors may lose out. “It’s not great. But it’s still better than being completely shut down and losing entirely to Meta. It’s probably like a C-minus outcome,” says Rui Ma, founder of Tech Buzz China, a research firm focused on Chinese tech.

Update 9/19/25 6:00pm ET: This story has been updated to include a statement posted by ByteDance.