Trump touts TikTok deal but doesn't address fear that China 'retains a veto'

By Victor Reklaitis and Christine Ji

President also says he'll meet with China's Xi Jinping in South Korea this fall

What's the deal with the Trump administration's agreement with China on TikTok?

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday said he and Chinese President Xi Jinping had finalized a deal on an American buyout of TikTok's U.S. business, but he didn't provide details on how officials will address a crucial concern about their agreement.

"We made progress on many very important issues including Trade, Fentanyl, the need to bring the War between Russia and Ukraine to an end, and the approval of the TikTok Deal," Trump said in a social-media post following a much-anticipated call between the two leaders.

Trump also said he agreed with Xi that they would meet at the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea, that he would go to China in the early part of next year and that the Chinese president would come to the U.S. "at an appropriate time." The two are due to be at the APEC summit on Oct. 31 and Nov. 1.

Friday's developments come after Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday that a preliminary agreement with Beijing on TikTok had been reached, but analysts said it wasn't clear how the framework for a deal matched up with a bipartisan 2024 law that has aimed to ban the social-media platform nationwide if it remained controlled by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.

Supporters of last year's law, which is called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, have voiced concerns this week about the fact that multiple published reports have said the Trump administration's agreement with Beijing calls for the content-recommendation algorithm for TikTok's U.S. app to rely on a license from ByteDance.

Rep. John Moolenaar of Michigan, a Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said in a statement Wednesday that he is "concerned the reported licensing deal may involve ongoing reliance by the new TikTok on a ByteDance algorithm and application that could allow continued CCP control or influence." Moolenaar said he looked forward to getting more information and discussing the matter to ensure any deal meets the requirements of last year's bipartisan legislation.

Ryan Fedasiuk, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, warned in an op-ed on Thursday for the Diplomat magazine that the CCP "retains a veto over the code that decides what 170 million Americans see every day." He said Congress should at minimum demand "independent, continuous auditing of TikTok's recommendation system, disclosure of major algorithmic changes, and enforceable transparency on how content is ranked or suppressed."

When asked about possible Chinese control of TikTok's algorithm during an Oval Office event on Friday afternoon, Trump told reporters that American investors will "have control of it," but didn't give details.

Oracle Corp. shares (ORCL) have gained nearly 6% this week as the software giant has appeared on track to be part of the American group that ends up with 80% of TikTok's U.S. operations, with Silicon Valley investment firms Andreessen Horowitz and Silver Lake also involved.

D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria on Monday characterized a potential TikTok-Oracle deal as "favorable" for Oracle, which has long counted TikTok as a major cloud customer in the U.S. Beyond maintaining a key customer, for Oracle the deal could create even more upside if its terms include a share of TikTok's ad revenue, according to Maribel Lopez, tech analyst and founder of Lopez Research.

"We're talking about the potential for Oracle to really harness a whole new growth engine in their business," Lopez told MarketWatch.

The TikTok deal isn't occurring in a vacuum, Lopez added. Progress could also be impacted by other U.S.-China negotiations, especially as tensions rise over Beijing's reported move this week to ban domestic technology companies from buying Nvidia Corp.'s (NVDA) artificial-intelligence chips.

The Chinese embassy in the U.S. offered its own statement Friday on the TikTok deal, saying China's 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."

Robert Schroeder contributed.

-Victor Reklaitis -Christine Ji

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09-19-25 1708ET