TikTok officially announced Friday that it has formed a joint venture that will allow the wildly popular video-sharing application to continue operating in the United States.
The new venture, named TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, was established pursuant to an executive order signed by US President Donald Trump in September 2025, the platform said. Under the new deal, TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance will sell a majority stake to a group of American investors, leaving it with a 19.9% stake.
“The majority U.S.-owned joint venture will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protection, algorithmic security, content moderation, and software assurance for U.S. users,” it added.
“We protect the U.S. content ecosystem through strong trust and safety policies and content moderation, while ensuring continued accountability through transparency reporting and third-party certification.”
To that end, U.S. users’ data will be protected in Oracle’s secure U.S. cloud environment, while TikTok’s content recommendation algorithm will be retrained and updated specifically based on domestic users. Recommendation algorithms are also secured using Oracle’s cloud infrastructure.
Additionally, the independent organization is expected to operate a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program, which will be audited and certified by third-party cybersecurity experts.
“The program complies with key industry standards such as National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) CSF, 800-53, and ISO 27001, as well as Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) restricted transaction security requirements,” the company said.
The joint venture’s safeguards will be extended to CapCut, Lemon8, and TikTok’s other apps and websites in the U.S. TikTok is used by more than 200 million Americans and 7.5 million businesses.
The development comes a month after reports emerged that TikTok had signed an agreement to form a new joint venture in the United States. Under President Trump’s September 2025 executive order, the attorney general was blocked for 120 days from enforcing national security laws to “authorize the completion of the planned sale,” allowing the transaction to close by January 23, 2026.
TikTok was temporarily banned a year ago after a federal ban went into effect. The bill, passed in April 2024, required the service to be made available under either a U.S. owner or another entity, citing national security concerns over Chinese owner ByteDance.
Lawmakers have claimed that the Chinese government could force the company to hand over the data of its U.S. users, a claim that both TikTok and ByteDance have consistently denied. These concerns led to a complete ban on TikTok in June 2020. At the end of 2024, the Canadian government ordered TikTok to dissolve its operations in the country.
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