Trump seems to claim TikTok deal ahead of Wednesday deadline

President Trump, who years ago led the charge to ban TikTok from the U.S., seemed to claim credit for saving it in a move he said should delight young voters.

Trump and negotiators suggested Monday that the short video platform owned by Chinese company ByteDance will avert a ban.

It is a remarkable turn of events that could end a years-long saga around the fate of the popular platform, which has become one of the most desirable assets in technology, even as it has been used as a geopolitical pawn reflecting the volatility of relations between China and the U.S.

Trump on Monday suggested that U.S. and Chinese officials struck an agreement ahead of a Wednesday deadline for ByteDance to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese owner because of national security concerns.

“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!,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform.

Trump said he would be speaking Friday with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Trump’s post came on the same day Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters there’s a “framework” for a TikTok deal and it’s expected to be finalized Friday. U.S. and Chinese officials have been holding trade talks in Spain.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury and TikTok didn’t respond to questions about the deal.

Li Chenggang, China’s international trade representative and vice minister of commerce, said the U.S. and Chinese officials had “candid, in-depth and constructive communication” on trade issues and TikTok, Xinhua, China’s state media agency, reported.

China opposes the “politicization, instrumentalization and weaponization of technology and economic-trade matters,” the report said.

TikTok, used by more than 170 million Americans, has faced the threat of a U.S. ban for years. Both Democrat and Republican politicians expressed fears that the Chinese government could compel ByteDance to share U.S. user data.

TikTok says on its website that it’s never been asked by the Chinese government to share U.S. data and would never do so, noting that it stores protected U.S. information in the Oracle Cloud and that its infrastructure is controlled by a data security entity TikTok created.

Details about how the deal would work are still murky. Oracle, a tech company founded in California but which moved its headquarters to Texas, saw its share price jump by more than 2% on Monday amid speculation that it could be involved in the deal.

TikTok, a platform on which people post goofy videos of dances, music clips, challenges and more, is popular among young people. Americans turn to the app to consume news, discover music and find other forms of entertainment. And politicians, including those in California, post on TikTok to reach young voters. The app includes a personalized video feed, showing users content in which they’re most likely to be interested.

TikTok’s origins date to 2016, when ByteDance launched a short-form video platform called Douyin in China before releasing an international version called TikTok. ByteDance then purchased Musical.ly, a lip-syncing platform based in Shanghai with an office in Santa Monica, and combined it with TikTok.

TikTok aggressively marketed the app in the U.S. and partnered with creators to fill the app with engaging content that can keep people scrolling for hours.

It’s popularity climbed during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, when people turned to social media to find more ways to entertain themselves while stuck at home. Responding to TikTok’s rise, social media platforms popular among young people such as Instagram and YouTube released new ways for people to share and edit short videos.

As TikTok grew, concerns about censorship, mental health harms, data privacy and national security escalated.

During Trump’s first term in 2020, he issued an executive order that required ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. operations after criticizing China for how it handled the coronavirus. TikTok sued the Trump administration and a federal judge blocked the enforcement of the executive order.

During the Biden administration, the president revoked Trump’s executive order but still issued one that called for the review of foreign-controlled apps that could pose a national security risk to Americans.

Scrutiny of the app from both parties continued, prompting lawmakers to grill TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew during a lengthy hearing in 2023.

President Biden in 2024 signed bipartisan legislation into law that would require ByteDance to sell TikTok by a certain deadline or the app would get banned in the U.S. The legal battle reached all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the TikTok ban this year.

In January, TikTok shut down the app in the U.S. for less than a day, sparking an outcry from its users and putting political pressure on the Trump administration to save it. Trump delayed the enforcement of the law and the deadline has been pushed back several times, giving TikTok and ByteDance time to find a potential U.S. buyer.

As Trump imposed tariffs on countries, including China, that also threatened to derail a potential deal with TikTok as the two countries negotiated over trade.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.