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If the latest public accounts are to be believed, what’s been a months-long, sometimes baffling saga over the fate of TikTok in the United States is finally — maybe — approaching a finish line.

Over the weekend, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CBS’s Face the Nation that he’d spent “a very good two days” in Malaysia negotiating with Chinese counterparts, and that those talks had “ironed out” the framework for a transaction that would put TikTok’s U.S. operations under American control. Bessent said an official announcement could come when Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping meet during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) gathering next week.

That comment lands amid a string of public signals dating back to September 19, when Mr. Trump posted that he had had “a very good” call with Xi, that he “appreciate[d] the TikTok approval,” and that the two leaders planned to meet again at APEC. The post set off a round of speculation about whether the White House and Beijing had quietly agreed on the broad contours of a deal.

What the public now has — in plain language — is a partial storyboard rather than a finished movie. Multiple outlets report a blueprint that would spin off a U.S.-facing version of TikTok, controlled by a consortium of U.S. investors while ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based parent, would retain some ownership or licensing rights to the platform’s underlying technology. Names reported in media accounts as attached to that investor group include members of the Murdoch family, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and Dell Technologies’ Michael Dell — though the exact structure, percentages and legal safeguards remain unclear.

Congress passed legislation last year aimed at forcing divestiture of apps owned or controlled by foreign adversaries; that law, and follow-on court rulings, set a clock that could have led to TikTok being removed from U.S. app stores. The administration that took office in January extended enforcement deadlines several times while it tried to work out a solution that would avoid a sudden shutdown of a platform used by tens of millions of Americans. The White House itself published an extension of enforcement measures this spring, reflecting the on-again, off-again nature of the enforcement timeline.

So the political calculus is obvious: a negotiated divestiture would keep a hugely influential platform online while attempting to answer national-security concerns about data access and foreign control. For the White House, the upside is a diplomatic win that lets the president claim he brokered an outcome rather than presiding over a ban. For Beijing, it is a way to defuse a long bilateral irritant without handing away ByteDance entirely. But that’s the optimistic gloss — and the devil, as ever, is in the details.

The big, unresolved questions

Even if the two governments have agreed on a deal in principle, journalists and technologists point to several unresolved but decisive issues:

• Who controls the algorithm? Several news reports say ByteDance could license the algorithm to the U.S. spinoff rather than handing it over outright — a move that would allow the American app to keep the features that made TikTok addictively successful while keeping the intellectual property in China. Critics argue that licensing without full control may leave the U.S. exposed to the very risks lawmakers were trying to eliminate.
• What legal firewall will actually exist? Congressional language and court rulings are precise: any divestiture must actually sever the kind of foreign-influence vectors experts worry about. A patchwork of contractual guarantees and minority stakes looks legally and politically vulnerable.
• Are reported investors truly willing, and who really calls the shots? The roster of potential buyers that’s circulated in media accounts is high-profile — but public reporting also suggests negotiations over valuation, governance and data custody have been thorny. Even if certain tycoons sign on, the final deal will need regulatory sign-offs and ironclad technical solutions for data security.

Beijing’s public posture — cautious, not celebratory

China’s official statements have been muted, and some Chinese commentators have pushed back against the idea of “selling” TikTok to the U.S. outright. Beijing will have to reconcile its own rules about technology transfer and national champions with any transaction that looks like a forced breakup. That’s one reason diplomats and trade officials have been working this through the back channels rather than on the front pages.

What to watch this week

Officials, including Bessent, say the leaders will have an opportunity to “consummate” the arrangement when they meet at APEC in Busan, South Korea — scheduled for Oct. 31–Nov. 1 — though small-print caveats remain. An announcement could come as a short joint statement, or as the sign-off on a more detailed framework that is later filled out by lawyers and regulators. Expect terse government language about a framework, followed by cautious statements from ByteDance and the investor parties — and almost immediately, a raft of legal challenges.

Voices of skepticism

Technology analysts and civil-liberties advocates have already warned that this kind of political deal risks being both transactional and fragile. Will licenses and contractual “warrants” survive judicial scrutiny? Will the new U.S. owners be able to insulate themselves — and user data — from cross-border vulnerabilities? Wired and other outlets have flagged that those technical and legal questions are far from answered, and that a headline-friendly handshake between presidents won’t necessarily resolve granular issues around code access, personnel and classification of algorithms.

How everyday users could be affected

If a deal is announced and implemented cleanly, U.S. users might see little immediate change: the app would stay live, content would continue to flow, and creators could carry on monetizing followers. But if the deal falters — or if a court finds it doesn’t meet statutory requirements — the specter of an app-store takedown or other enforcement action will return quickly, and creators and small businesses that rely on TikTok could face disruption.

For now, the story is both simple and maddeningly incomplete: U.S. officials, led publicly by Scott Bessent, say the outline of a deal is finished and that Presidents Trump and Xi could put their names to it this week. But the technical and legal scaffolding that would make such a deal defensible — to Congress, to the courts, and to security experts — has not been made public. If the leaders do sign something in Busan, the weeks that follow will be a race between lawyers, technologists and regulators to see whether a negotiated solution can stand up to scrutiny — or whether the next chapter in this saga will be a courtroom.