TikTok's algorithm will be overseen by Oracle in the US (www.cnn.com)

The White House confirmed that, under the pending deal to shift TikTok’s U.S. operations into a majority-American ownership group, the app’s recommendation algorithm will be copied to and operated inside the United States and overseen by Oracle. The new U.S. joint venture — to include Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake and other U.S. and global investors, with ByteDance retaining under 20% — will get the algorithm source, review it, retrain it on U.S. user data, and be monitored continuously by Oracle. The administration plans to treat the arrangement as a “qualified divestiture” under last year’s ban-or-sale law, extend the enforcement pause to allow regulatory approvals, and expects the deal to close after Chinese signoff. Technically and politically this is significant: custody, retraining and continuous monitoring of the ranking model address core national‑security concerns about foreign influence via recommendation manipulation, while enforcing data residency and operational separation. But it creates engineering and governance challenges — extracting, validating and retraining a live recommendation model on new data, proving no covert ties to ByteDance (the law forbids cooperation on the algorithm), and potentially maintaining a U.S.-only variant of TikTok (raising fragmentation and UX issues). Oracle’s expanded role builds on its existing U.S. data-hosting arrangement; the deal’s success will hinge on audits, access controls, and whether the retrained model reproduces the app’s engagement dynamics without foreign control.