President Trump on Friday granted TikTok another reprieve by announcing that he would extend the deadline for when the popular app had to make a deal to be separated from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or face a ban in the United States.
TikTok, which had been facing a Saturday deadline for a deal, now has another 75 days to find a new owner to comply with a federal law that requires it to change its structure to resolve national security concerns. That puts the new deadline for a deal in mid-June.
The delay was President Trump’s second for TikTok this year. He first paused enforcement of the law in January, even after it was unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court.
“The Deal requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Friday, adding that “we do not want TikTok to ‘go dark.’” He added that he looked forward to “working with TikTok and China” to close the deal and suggested he would consider using the app as a negotiating chip with China on tariffs.
Mr. Trump’s latest action highlights the intractable nature of the dilemma with TikTok, which has endured years of scrutiny in the United States over its Chinese ties. Even as lawmakers and U.S. officials repeatedly raised questions about whether TikTok was secure, the app cemented its role as a cultural juggernaut, with more than 170 million users in the country who use it to make memes and share videos.
The extension is happening at a particularly fraught time in U.S.-China relations. This week, Mr. Trump levied a 34 percent tariff on goods from China. On Friday, Beijing retaliated with 34 percent across-the-board tariffs on imports from the United States. Mr. Trump has repeatedly suggested he could lower the China tariffs as part of a deal for the app, which will need the Chinese government’s approval.
The delay also renewed questions about Mr. Trump’s willingness to put his presidential power ahead of the rule of law. The federal law that aimed to change TikTok’s ownership or have the app be banned was passed last year with wide bipartisan support and took effect in January after the Supreme Court ruling. But Mr. Trump effectively overrode the law when he paused enforcement of it that month.
For now, one thing is certain: TikTok will continue to operate in the United States for the foreseeable future. In January, the app briefly went dark around the time the federal law took effect, before flickering back to life.
ByteDance on Friday acknowledged for the first time that it has been involved in the TikTok negotiations with the U.S. government.
“There are key matters to be resolved,” a spokesperson for ByteDance said in an email. “Any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law.”
The delay followed tense, last-minute negotiations and a flurry of interest from potential buyers. The law calls for no more than 20 percent of TikTok or its parent company to be owned by people or corporations in so-called foreign adversary countries, a list that includes China. To achieve that, ByteDance could sell TikTok or bring on new investors to reduce the proportion of Chinese investors, among other options.
Vice President JD Vance, whom Mr. Trump tapped to help oversee the deal talks, said as recently as Thursday that a deal was imminent. Though Amazon submitted a bid to buy the entire company, much of the speculation in recent weeks centered on an option in which existing U.S. investors in ByteDance would roll over their stakes into a new independent global TikTok company, and additional U.S. investors would be brought on. The private equity firms Blackstone and Silver Lake had weighed taking a stake in TikTok, as had the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
It isn’t clear whether that kind of arrangement would satisfy the law, or the policymakers who pushed for it.
Some were especially concerned about what might happen to TikTok’s coveted algorithm, which figures out what users like and populates a customized feed for them. Under the law, a new TikTok entity cannot cooperate with ByteDance “with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm” or for data sharing.
“If this ends up with a deal where the algorithm stays in Beijing, then the whole thing’s a scam, the whole thing’s a fraud,” Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, said on Friday. “The law is explicitly clear.”
A group of Republican lawmakers on two House committees — one focused on China and competition and the other on energy and commerce — said in a statement Friday that “any resolution must ensure that U.S. law is followed, and that the Chinese Communist Party does not have access to American user data or the ability to manipulate the content consumed by Americans.”
“We remain committed to enforcing the framework established by Congress to safeguard the American people,” said the group, which included Representative John Moolenaar, Republican of Michigan, who chairs the committee on China.
The concerns about TikTok’s Chinese ownership have been brewing for years. Intelligence officials and lawmakers have argued that ByteDance could hand over sensitive U.S. user data to Beijing, like location information, based on laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence-gathering operations. They have also claimed that China could use TikTok’s content recommendations to fuel misinformation, a concern that escalated in the United States after the start of the Israel-Hamas war and during the presidential election.
TikTok has long pushed back on Washington’s concerns and sought to address them without a sale. It has said it has never misused data or spread propaganda at the behest of Beijing in the United States. But despite a multibillion dollar security effort that sought to give the American government unique oversight of TikTok’s operations, the company could not win the trust of Washington.
Lindsay Gorman, the managing director of the technology program at the German Marshall Fund and a technology adviser under the Biden administration, said the Trump administration’s support for the app was a win for China.
“That is the purest victory out there — that a democratic country that’s supposed to be a nation of laws is declining to enforce it on pressure from a foreign government and its corporate intermediaries,” she said.
The law bars technology companies from distributing or updating TikTok under the threat of serious financial penalties. Apple and Google removed TikTok from their app stores for nearly a month until they received assurances from the Justice Department that they would not face fines for carrying TikTok in the stores.
Lawmakers have suggested that those companies could face shareholder lawsuits in the future, if they continue to distribute and host TikTok in the United States under the current administration.
Akamai Technologies, a Massachusetts-based company that helps deliver TikTok videos to phones, recently updated the risk factors in its annual filing to note that, “even though President Trump has extended the enforcement deadline for a ban on the Chinese application, there is no assurance that we will not be exposed to liability.”
David McCabe contributed reporting from Washington.
