"China keeps the algorithm": Critics attack Trump's TikTok deal (arstechnica.com)

President Trump has pushed the ByteDance divestiture deadline to December 16 as talks move toward a deal that would shift roughly 80% of TikTok’s ownership to a U.S. investor consortium reportedly including Oracle, Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz, with an “American‑dominated” board and one member designated by the U.S. government. The administration says the extension buys time to finalize terms within weeks, but critics and some Republicans warn Congress could still block the framework under the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act if national‑security concerns persist. For AI/ML practitioners the critical detail is that China would retain the core TikTok recommendation algorithm—licensing it rather than handing it over—forcing any U.S. version to re‑engineer its recommender system and possibly operate on different data pipelines. That has practical consequences: model architecture, training data access, feature engineering and live‑serving infrastructure would need to be recreated or forked, likely degrading recommendation quality and stability in the short term. Cross‑availability of user‑generated content between U.S. and “rest of world” apps (per reports) further complicates data separation and privacy assumptions. The outcome will influence debates about model provenance, IP vs. data control, and how governments can mitigate perceived AI risks without starving product performance.