A top Republican lawmaker is raising “serious concerns” about the deal to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations, saying that any plan to license the app’s powerful algorithm from its Chinese parent company is a “problem.”
Representative John Moolenaar, the chair of the House Select Committee on China, expressed concern about any arrangement that leaves China with “leverage over the algorithm.” He even suggested that the new American owners might need to build a whole new algorithm from scratch. “I just believe you have to have a new algorithm, and I don’t know that you can reprogram,” Moolenaar said, pointing out that no one really knows what’s inside the current one.
The comments come after President Donald Trump recently approved a plan for ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, to sell the app’s U.S. assets to a group of American and global investors. The White House has said that the deal will include the new owners licensing the algorithm.
Trump’s order states that the algorithm will be “retrained and monitored” by U.S. security partners and will be under the control of the new company. But for Moolenaar and other critics, that’s not enough. The deal is still a “work in progress,” he said, and the issue of who controls the algorithm is a major sticking point.
The future of TikTok in the U.S. has been hanging in the balance for months, with a law set to ban the app in January unless a sale goes through. This new concern from a key lawmaker adds another layer of complexity to an already very complicated deal.
