Oracle to Retrain TikTok Algorithm Under New US Ownership

Trump will give the investors and ByteDance 120 days to finalize a deal.

The TikTok logo and the US flag are seen on screens in Hong Kong, on Jan. 18, 2025. Anthony Kwan/Getty Images

U.S. cloud company Oracle will oversee the code and security of TikTok, a senior White House official said on Sept. 22.

President Donald Trump is set to sign an executive order this week that will extend the TikTok divestiture deadline for 120 days, by the end of which the administration expects the joint venture deal for TikTok to be concluded.

A law went into effect last year requiring China-based ByteDance to divest itself of the popular social media app or cease operations, setting off a countdown for divestment with a deadline that began just before Trump took office and that has been extended multiple times.

On Sept. 16, just before the latest deadline, the president extended it until Dec. 16 to allow time for negotiations with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The further extension confirmed on Sept. 22 will be the fifth time Trump has extended the deadline.

The White House official said that the new venture is to be majority American-owned and confirmed that private equity firm Silver Lake and cloud company Oracle are among the investors.

ByteDance will retain less than a 20 percent stake in the new venture, in line with the divestiture law.

Trump, in his first administration, had pushed for American ownership of TikTok and had previewed several likely investors, including American billionaires and tech giants.

The American board members will have backgrounds in cybersecurity and national security to bring “the necessary oversight and know-how” to ensure that the joint venture “is both successful and safe and secure for Americans,” the White House official said. Unlike with other major tech deals Trump has assisted with recently, such as with Intel, the U.S. government will not be taking a share in the new joint venture.

ByteDance is expected to sign a framework agreement with one of the new managing investors following Trump’s expected executive order. Within the 120-day period from the signing, there will also be several regulatory reviews on both the U.S. and China sides.

Oracle’s Role

The official said that acquiring the algorithm for the popular social media app was a “tough point of negotiation” and required some compromise to meet both U.S. and Chinese legal requirements.

Chinese export laws on recommendation algorithms were what previously prevented the sale of TikTok to U.S. investors. Trump announced after a two-hour call with Xi on Sept. 19 that the two leaders had made progress on a deal.

He then told reporters, “We look forward to getting that deal closed.”

A copy of the content recommendation algorithm will be acquired by the new venture, and Oracle will be responsible for inspecting it, retraining it with U.S. data, and continuously monitoring it to “ensure that it is behaving appropriately, that it’s not being used for any kind of malicious purpose and that it’s not being unduly influenced,” according to the official.

The official said Oracle will be responsible for overseeing the security of the app, which includes how it interacts with users’ phones and how user data are handled.

Oracle currently already stores TikTok data for U.S. users on servers in the United States and will continue to do so.

Oracle and ByteDance did not respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times.