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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
A TikTok deal has finally been reached with China, the Trump
administration says
By David Goldman, CNN
Updated:
8:58 PM EDT, Mon September 15, 2025
Source: CNN
A deal has been reached between the Trump administration and China to
keep TikTok operational in the United States, administration officials
announced Monday, concluding a yearslong effort that began during
President Donald Trump’s first term.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that a framework agreement has
been reached, and Trump will speak with Chinese leader Xi Jinping
Friday to finalize the deal. The agreement and conversation is a
precursor to a Trump-Xi meeting that both sides have sought for months,
US officials said Monday after a framework plan was announced.
“President Trump played a role in this, we had a call with him last
night, we had specific guidance from him we shared it with our Chinese
counterparts,” Bessent said in Madrid on Monday. “Without his
leadership and the leverage he provides, we would not have been able to
include the deal today.”
The Trump administration did not name the US-backed buyer, but the
group is widely expected to be led by Oracle executive chairman Larry
Ellison, who last week . Trump in January had said he would champion
Ellison, a Trump supporter, buying the app’s US assets.
Chinese and US diplomats have been meeting this week in Spain to
discuss trade and other matters. Bessent, leading the latest round of
trade talks with China on behalf of the United States, had said that
TikTok was one of the subjects likely to be discussed.
“We were very focused on TikTok and making sure that it was a deal
that is fair for the Chinese and completely respects US national
security concerns, and that’s the deal we reached,” said US Trade
Representative Jamieson Greer on Monday. “And of course, we want to
ensure that the Chinese have a fair, invested environment in the United
States, but always that US national security comes first.”
Li Chenggang, China’s top trade negotiator and vice minister of
commerce, said the two sides held “candid and in-depth exchanges”
and reached a “basic framework consensus” to keep TikTok
operational in the US.
The framework agreed upon includes “resolving TikTok-related issues
through cooperation, reducing investment barriers, and promoting
relevant economic and trade cooperation,” Li told reporters in
Madrid, according to Chinese state media, adding that China won’t
seek any deal at the expense of its principles or corporate interests.
Wang Jingtao, a deputy director of China’s Cyberspace Administration,
said the deal could include methods such as the entrusted operation of
TikTok’s US user data and the licensing of algorithms and
intellectual property rights, Chinese state media reported.
TikTok and its parent company ByteDance did not immediately respond to
CNN’s request for comment about the status of a deal.
Trump multiple times has extended a self-imposed deadline to reach a
deal with China to sell at least part of TikTok parent company
ByteDance’s US TikTok business to an American-backed owner. A
bipartisan bill passed by Congress and signed by former President Joe
Biden banned TikTok in the United States because of national security
concerns, allowing the app to continue operating in America only if its
China-based owner divested its stake in the US assets of the social
media company.
TikTok in the United States on January 18, the day before the Foreign
Adversary Controlled Applications Act went into effect. But on January
19, one day before Trump took office for his second term, he said he
would sign an executive action upon the beginning of his term that
would ensure US companies would not be punished for hosting TikTok on
their app stores or servers.
The executive order, signed on January 20, delayed for 75 days the
enforcement of the law. Trump extended the deadline again in June. The
deadline had most recently been extended to September 17, but Trump was
widely expected to move the deadline again if a deal didn’t come
together in time.
The law gives the president broad discretion on how to enforce the ban.
But critics have said Trump’s extensions thwarted the will of
Congress.
Trump toward the end of his first term had advocated for banning TikTok
— a policy he never got passed but which Biden eventually supported
and signed into law. But Trump’s opinion eventually changed after he
viewed the social media app as contributing to his election victory in
2024.
TikTok boasts around 170 million US users, many of them young people
– a contingent that offered significantly more support to the
Republican presidential candidate in the 2024 election than that
segment of the population has in recent years. Trump has repeatedly ,
but no breakthrough emerged until Monday.
Who is buying TikTok?
Several investment groups have come forward in recent months saying
that they would be interested in buying TikTok. Among the most
prominent has been led by former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank
McCourt and investor Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” fame, who have
to own TikTok, and who made an offer to ByteDance.
But TikTok would likely cost more than the group can afford — likely
in the tens of billions of dollars. So that group said it offered to
purchase TikTok’s US assets without the app’s secret sauce: its
algorithm that hooks users into watching video after video on the
platform. They said they were convinced they could create a comparable
algorithm from scratch.
That’s why industry analysts believe a much more likely candidate to
buy TikTok’s US assets is Ellison, who has the capability of leading
a group of investors with the money to buy the algorithm — and whose
company already has a relationship with TikTok.
Oracle in 2020 began hosting TikTok’s US data, and it briefly reached
a deal with the first Trump administration that year to buy TikTok,
before that deal was ultimately blocked.
Trump has previously said he would seek a 50-50 joint venture between
ByteDance and a new American owner. It has since been heavily debated
whether any amount of Chinese ownership would be allowed by law, and
the Trump administration didn’t clarify what kind of agreement it had
secured on Monday.
China, up until this point, has been hesitant to allow ByteDance to
give up its US stake. But as trade tensions between the companies
reached an inflection point in the spring and continued throughout the
summer – evidenced by China’s announcement Monday that Nvidia had
violated its antitrust laws – Chinese authorities apparently decided
that it should play ball.
Without a TikTok deal in place, a meeting between Trump and Xi
wouldn’t be possible, US officials said. An agreement makes it more
likely the two leaders will sit down when Trump visits Asia at the end
of October, according to those officials.
Trump in late October and early November has an Asia trip planned, and
their first in-person meeting of Trump’s second term could, in
theory, take place then.
Trump on Monday hinted that a deal is now close.
“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 “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.”
CNN’s Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed a
quote characterizing the deal as fair for China while respecting US
national security concerns. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer
issued that statement.
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