Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday the U.S. and China have finalized an agreement on TikTok that would allow the popular social media platform to remain available in the U.S.
“In Kuala Lumpur, we finalized the TikTok agreement in terms of getting Chinese approval,” Bessent told Fox Business. “And I would expect that would go forward in the coming weeks and months, and we’ll finally see a resolution to that.”
President Trump approved the deal last month after receiving the “go-ahead” from Chinese President Xi Jinping. Under the agreement, TikTok will be spun off into a separate U.S. entity, majority owned by American investors such as Oracle and Silver Lake.
The deal seeks to limit the role of TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, to comply with a 2024 law requiring the firm to divest from TikTok or face a ban on U.S. networks and app stores.
The app’s future remained in limbo for nine months, as Trump repeatedly delayed enforcement of the divest-or-ban law in an effort to reach a deal to “save” TikTok, which he had promised to do during his 2024 campaign.
China, meanwhile, has continued to offer more tepid assessments of the status of the TikTok deal. A spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said Thursday that Beijing had agreed to work with the U.S. to resolve issues related to TikTok.
The latest development on the TikTok deal came as Trump and Xi met in South Korea. The highly anticipated meeting saw the two world leaders agree to ease recent trade tensions, with the U.S. scaling back tariffs and China delaying export controls on rare earth minerals and resuming some soybean purchases.
