TikTok Forms U.S. Joint Venture to Continue Operations Under 2025 Executive Order - The Hacker News

TikTok Forms U.S. Joint Venture to Continue Operations Under 2025 Executive Order Ravie LakshmananJan 23, 2026Regulatory Compliance / National Security TikTok on Friday officially announced that it formed a joint venture that will allow the hugely popular video-sharing application to continue operating in the U.S. The new venture, named TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by U.S. President Donald Trump in September 2025, the platform said. The new deal will see TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, selling the majority of its stake to a group of majority-American investors, while it will retain a 19.9% stake in the business. The Chinese government hasn't commented publicly on the agreement. "The majority American owned Joint Venture will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for U.S. users," it added. "It will safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem through robust trust and safety policies and content moderation while ensuring continuous accountability through transparency reporting and third-party certifications." To that end, U.S. users' data will be protected with Oracle's secure U.S. cloud environment, while also retraining and updating TikTok's content recommendation algorithm specifically based on users in the country. The recommendation algorithm will be secured using Oracle's cloud infrastructure as well. In addition, the independent entity is expected to operate a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program that it said will be audited and certified by third-party cybersecurity experts. "The program will adhere to major industry standards, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) CSF and 800-53 and ISO 27001, as well as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Security Requirements for Restricted Transactions, the company said. The safeguards rolled out by the joint venture will also extend to CapCut, Lemon8, and TikTok's other apps and websites in the U.S. TikTok is used by over 200 million Americans and 7.5 million businesses. President Trump hailed the deal in a Truth Social post, stating that the company would now be owned by a "group of Great American Patriots and Investors, the Biggest in the World." He also thanked Chinese President Xi Jinping for working with his administration, and "ultimately, approving the Deal." The development comes a month after reports emerged that TikTok had signed an agreement to create a new U.S. joint venture. Under President Trump's September 2025 executive order, the attorney general was blocked from enforcing the national security law for a 120-day period in order to "permit the contemplated divestiture to be completed," allowing the deal to be finalized by January 23, 2026. TikTok was briefly banned a year ago after a federal law, signed by former President Joe Biden, went into effect. The legislation, passed in April 2024, mandated that the service be made available either under American ownership or another entity, citing national security concerns over its Chinese owner, ByteDance. Lawmakers have argued that Beijing could force the firm to hand over U.S. users' data, a claim that both TikTok and ByteDance have consistently denied. These fears have also led to an outright ban of TikTok in India in June 2020. In late 2024, the Canadian government ordered TikTok to dissolve its operations in the country. Update TikTok's new U.S. joint venture has made changes to its privacy policy that will allow it to collect users' precise geolocation as opposed to just the approximate location, depending on the device permissions. The updated terms also include a clause for collecting information from interacting with its artificial intelligence (AI) tools, "including prompts, questions, files, and other types of information that you submit to our AI-powered interfaces, as well as the responses they generate." Found this article interesting? Follow us on Google News, Twitter and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post. 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