US Government Says TikTok Deal is Getting Close

A quick update on the TikTok U.S. situation: According U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, who’s been tasked with organizing a TikTok deal, the app’s future in the nation is likely to be secured ahead of its April 4th extension deadline.

To recap, on January 19th, the Senate-approved “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” went into law, which, among other elements, meant that TikTok was required to be sold to a U.S.-owned entity in order to address national security concerns about the app. It wasn’t, which meant that TikTok would be required to leave the U.S. market, but upon his inauguration as President a day later, Donald Trump granted TikTok and parent company ByteDance an additional 75 days to arrange a deal that would meet these new requirements.

That 75-day deadline is up on April 4th, which is when a deal to keep TikTok available in the U.S. needs to be established.

And Vance believes that this is possible, despite limited public information about a potential deal thus far.

As reported by AP:

“Vice President JD Vance said Friday that he was hopeful a deal to keep TikTok operating in the U.S. will be wrapped up by the early April deadline. ‘There will almost certainly be a high-level agreement that I think satisfies our national security concerns, allows there to be a distinct American TikTok enterprise,’ Vance said in an interview with NBC News abroad Air Force Two.”

This is despite conflicting reports about the progress, or not, of a U.S. TikTok deal, with ByteDance reporting limited accessibility, and insight from U.S. officials.

President Trump, meanwhile, has said that there are four good offers on the table for the U.S. operations of the app, while The Information reported late last week that Oracle was the government’s preferred partner in the project.

Which makes sense, given Trump’s connection with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Oracle is also who Trump previously tried to sell the U.S. operations of TikTok to back in 2020, after he initially sought to ban the app, in order to punish China for the spread of COVID 19 (yes, that was really the reason), while Oracle has also partnered with ByteDance on its Project Texas U.S. data separation project, establishing a working partnership between the two.

So it seems that TikTok will remain available in the U.S. after all, in some form of joint partnership between Oracle and its Chinese parent company. It remains to be seen exactly how that will work, and it might still be a challenge to get the Chinese government to go along with the arrangement.

But for those concerned about the future of the app in America, the U.S. government says that things are progressing.