China Could Still Run Wild on TikTok After Trump’s New Deal

The ban on TikTok was set to come into effect on Sept. 17. It was delayed this week as Trump administration officials negotiated with their Chinese counterparts. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

About the author: Justin Sherman is the founder and CEO of Global Cyber Strategies, a research and advisory firm, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

After a five-year saga, the White House said this week it has reached a tentative deal to resolve U.S. worries about Chinese control over social media giant TikTok.

Under the forthcoming deal, the U.S. version of the app would fall under the purview of a group of U.S. investors that would own 80% of a newly-formed company. Chinese shareholders would own the rest. U.S. officials claim this arrangement will alleviate security concerns while benefiting trade.

Part of this may be true: Moving TikTok into American hands and outside of the Chinese state’s legal reach would address some of the real national security risks around data security and information manipulation. But U.S. ownership of TikTok would only be a fractional win.

It might limit issues like direct Chinese government data access. That is important. But it wouldn’t prevent Chinese actors from running disinformation campaigns on the app, taking out propagandistic ad space, or setting up front company networks to illicitly access user data through advertising plugins. Nor does it mean the U.S. ownership setup is robustly secured and adequately monitored.

Rather, the TikTok deal represents yet another instance of the Trump administration sidelining national security in favor of trade-positive headlines—and it undermines long-term U.S. credibility on tech-security threats.

When the first Trump administration attempted to ban TikTok through a 2020 executive order, which was later overturned in the courts, it was adamant that the Chinese government could use the app to potentially spy on Americans, build dossiers on government personnel, and manipulate content via the app’s Chinese parent company. These worries carried into the Biden administration. President Joe Biden signed a TikTok ban into law in April 2024, and he issued an executive order that created regulations for the related issue of transfers of Americans’ data overseas.

In recent months, however, the government’s hard-line position has dissipated. Trump’s second administration simply hasn’t enforced the Biden-era federal law, which the Supreme Court unanimously upheld. Once back in office, Trump went silent on his original concerns about national security risks.

Details of the coming deal are still sparse. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent didn’t get into the specific commercial terms of the deal in a press conference from Madrid, where U.S. officials negotiated with their Chinese counterparts this week. But his team underscored that the deal’s objective is to compel an ownership change and to be fair to China. It would also tag on other trade terms, such as lowering investment barriers and pave the way for Trump to advance trade talks.

Pushing such a hard line on the tech-security risks—one with which both Democrats and Republicans in Congress agreed on for years—and then seemingly deprioritizing them is bad for U.S. credibility. It seems to indicate that national security is nothing more than a bargaining chip in trade negotiations. That may make other nations skeptical the next time Washington calls a piece of technology a “security threat.”

This happened with the U.S. campaign against Huawei: The Trump administration cited security concerns in their 2019 effort to get countries to ban the Chinese telecom giant’s equipment. That push crumbled because other countries felt those fears were a mask covering for selfish American economic ends. Spinning TikTok into a trade deal, whatever the intent, revives this feeling.

Other countries will catch on to the pattern. Nvidia chips can’t be sold to China for national security reasons, but when the U.S. government gets a slice of the profits, the export controls vanish —even though the China threat didn’t change. The United Arab Emirates isn’t a good AI partner because of its China ties, yet when the UAE offers U.S. officials a financial “win” for a few firms, suddenly the government seems no longer concerned about that risk. And now, the TikTok ban won’t be enforced until the White House extracts trade wins from China.

In the coming months, the Trump administration is highly likely to push for other countries to put restrictions on pieces of Chinese technology and the firms that make them. This might include telecom providers like China Unicom, a state-owned firm that operates submarine cables. This might also include DeepSeek and other Chinese AI start-ups whose software U.S. authorities want expelled from other countries. It could include emerging space and biotech firms, or any other foreign company that suddenly finds itself in the headlines.

But the Trump administration’s handling of TikTok may come back to bite American policymakers. Instead of seeing an ally or partner worried about Chinese cyber espionage or supply chain infiltration, other countries will only see hidden trade motivations. They may resist U.S. calls—and real, persistent national security risks will go unaddressed as a result.

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