US and China agreement on TikTok's US operations includes China's ByteDance choosing one of seven board members for the new entity, with Americans holding the six other seats, a senior White House official said.
According to Reuters, President Donald Trump is trying to keep the short video app with 170 million US users from being banned after Congress passed a law in 2024 that ordered it shut down by January 2025 if its U.S. assets were not sold by owner ByteDance.
Trump has delayed enforcement of the law through mid-December amid efforts to extract TikTok's US assets from the global platform, line up American investors and ensure the new ownership qualifies as a full divestiture needed under the 2024 law.
This week's progress toward a deal marked a rare breakthrough in months-long talks between the world's two biggest economies that have sought to defuse a wide-ranging trade war that has unnerved global markets.
Trump said on Friday that he and Chinese President Xi Jinping had made progress on a TikTok agreement in a phone call and would meet face-to-face in six weeks. But Beijing's statements have not clarified how advanced the progress has been.
Details of the agreement, as laid out by the senior White House official, largely align with reporting from Reuters and other news outlets in recent days.
The official said Trump would extend the latest pause in enforcement of the 2024 law for an additional 120 days, suggesting the next deadline for an agreement to be finalized would be in April.
