How TikTok's deal to stay in the US will work, according to the White House (www.businessinsider.com)

The White House confirmed a near-term deal to keep TikTok operating in the U.S.: a consortium of majority-U.S. investors (reportedly including Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and possibly the Murdochs) will buy TikTok’s U.S. assets, with Oracle serving as the data-and-security provider and taking control of a “carved-off” version of TikTok’s recommendation algorithm. The sale follows a 2024 divest-or-ban law aimed at separating ByteDance—founded in China—from its U.S. app; the administration says the algorithm will be “retrained and operated in the United States outside of ByteDance’s control.” U.S. users will still see global content and vice versa, and the deal could be finalized by the end of the week. Technically and strategically this is significant because it sets a precedent for national control over deployed recommender systems. “Carving off” the algorithm implies recreating or reweighting the model on U.S. infrastructure and datasets, with Oracle and U.S. oversight responsible for model retraining, data custody, and security auditing. That raises practical questions about access to training data, model weights, continuity of personalization, content moderation policies, algorithmic performance and drift, and how cross-border content flows will be managed without leaking sensitive telemetry to ByteDance. The arrangement also establishes a regulatory template for handling foreign-owned AI platforms where national-security and data-sovereignty concerns intersect.