Oracle, ByteDance accept new terms on TikTok

WASHINGTON — The Chinese company that owns TikTok has accepted the Trump administration’s changes to a deal designed to mitigate the White House’s concerns that the popular app poses a national security threat, people with knowledge of the talks said.

The Treasury Department, which leads a group reviewing the deal for national security purposes, provided TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, with revisions to its proposal Wednesday. Some of the revisions were intended to address how TikTok’s data and source code would be handled and secured. The two sides have agreed in principle but are still discussing some technical details.

The exact ownership structure of TikTok under the proposed deal is unclear. President Donald Trump and some members of his administration have said that ByteDance cannot retain a majority stake in TikTok if their concerns are to be satisfied. Oracle, the Silicon Valley business softwaremaker, is set to be a technology partner for TikTok while taking an ownership stake in the app but would not own it outright.

Any resolution on ownership could involve some tricky math. The percentage of TikTok owned by non-U.S. interests depends partly on how officials treat the portion of ByteDance, a privately held company, that is already backed by U.S. investors, one person said.

The deal still requires approval from Trump. As of early Thursday afternoon, the president had not been briefed on it.

An executive order signed by Trump essentially mandates that TikTok strike a deal to sell its U.S. operations by Sunday or risk having all of its commercial transactions halted in the United States.

TikTok and a spokesperson for the Treasury Department declined to comment. Oracle did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

TikTok is also hunting for a permanent chief executive to replace Kevin Mayer, who resigned in late August, citing the changing political pressures of the role. Vanessa Pappas, general manager of TikTok in North America, took over in the interim.

Among those whom TikTok has talked to about the job is Kevin Systrom, a founder and former chief executive of Instagram. Talks are preliminary, and no final decisions have been made. Systrom did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.