The latest impending deal is the real deal, President Trump implies. What has changed (Reuters, September 16, 2025)?
President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced an agreement between the U.S. and China to keep TikTok operating in the United States, with three sources familiar with the matter saying the deal was similar to one discussed earlier this year.
The agreement requires TikTok’s American assets to be transferred to U.S. owners from China’s ByteDance, potentially resolving a saga that has lingered for nearly a year.
A deal for the popular social media app, which counts 170 million U.S. users, would represent a breakthrough in months-long talks between the two biggest economies as they seek to defuse a wide-ranging trade war that has unnerved global markets.
“We have a deal on TikTok. We have a group of very big companies that want to buy it,” Trump said at a White House briefing, without providing further details. The announcement comes a day before a September 17 deadline to sell or shut down the short video app.
The readiness of a U.S. firm or a group of U.S. firms to buy TikTok is old news.
So the new news is only—if it is true—the willingness of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist to really relinquish control of the app, if in fact they would be doing so merely by accepting a switch to U.S. ownership. Cyberhackers working on behalf of the People’s Republic of China have demonstrated their ability to penetrate U.S. telecom network and other systems and lurk undetected for years without having the benefit of any prior intimate knowledge of those systems. Would it be impossible for them to monitor TikTok user data with the benefit of the CCP’s prior intimate knowledge of TikTok’s software and how it works?
Resolution
Reuters says that the latest almost-deal, proto-deal, incipient deal, deal in the works, whatever it is, “potentially” resolves the months-long saga. Why “potentially”? Isn’t the announcement of a forthcoming announcement enough to prove that we are asymptotically approaching the limit of this bizarre series of sham ultimatums? It’s simple calculus. Read your Leibniz and Newton.
Of course, there’s this: “The announcement comes a day before a September 17 deadline to sell or shut down the short video app. Later in the day the White House extended that deadline until December 16. The White House declined to provide any further details on the agreement with China. The delay will give ByteDance another 90 days….”
If a deal is to be had, it could have been sealed back in January if the TikTok app, allowed to go offline only briefly back then, had been allowed to stay dark until the sale and transfer were complete.
Treasury Scott Bessent said on Tuesday that “President Trump made it clear that he would have been willing to let TikTok go dark, that we were not going to give up national security in favor of the deal.” The president is unwilling to jeopardize national security as he has been doing since January and will be doing for another three months—in violation of congressional legislation that does not provide for such seriatim delays.
Wang Jingtao, with the PRC’s cyberspace administration, said that “licensing the algorithm and other intellectual property rights” would be part of the deal. ByteDance would “entrust the operation of TikTok’s US user data and content security.”
Does this mean that the U.S. version of TikTok would be using an algorithm also used by ByteDance?
Sharing
According to a spokesman for the House Select Committee on the CCP: “It wouldn’t be in compliance if the algorithm is Chinese. There can’t be any shared algorithm with ByteDance.”
