The US and China might finally have a TikTok deal

The US and China have reached a “framework” deal to divest TikTok from its Chinese parent company, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters during trade talks in Madrid on Monday. As noted by Reuters, Bessent confirmed that

“the framework is for a switch to a U.S.-controlled ownership.” He said Trump will confirm the deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday — two days after the latest deadline to sell or ban the app.

The preliminary deal comes after months of rocky negotiations between TikTok and the Trump administration. The app faced a ban in January, but President Donald Trump granted TikTok an extension to work out a deal to sell its operations in the US, as required by the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. Trump granted TikTok two more extensions after that, giving it until September 17th to reach an agreement. It’s unknown whether he will formally extend the deadline or consider this announcement sufficient to count as a divestiture; it’s also unclear whether the deal will satisfy the requirements laid out in the law. 

Bessent told reporters that the US and China are “very close” to reaching a deal, but that China had some “very aggressive asks,” according to The New York Times. (The parties were close to a deal earlier this year too, but it fell through thanks to Trump’s trade war.) In July, reports from The Information and Reuters suggested that Oracle and several other investors, including Susquehanna International Group and Andreessen Horowitz, would make a bid for TikTok, while its China-owned parent company, ByteDance, would get a minority stake. TikTok is reportedly working on a new version of the app with an algorithm trained only on data from US users. 

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said the meeting between China and the US went “VERY WELL,” adding that “a deal was also reached on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”