Overview

• A 2024 bipartisan law gives ByteDance until September 17 to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations or face a ban, but President Trump has granted multiple delays to support a deal.
• Under internal project M2, TikTok engineers are duplicating the app’s codebase, AI models and user data to launch a standalone U.S. platform with its own recommendation algorithm.
• U.S. user data will be kept entirely separate under legal requirements; the existing global TikTok app is slated for removal from U.S. app stores once M2 goes live.
• A consortium led by Susquehanna International Group, General Atlantic, KKR, Blackstone, Andreessen Horowitz and Oracle stands ready to acquire the U.S. business; ByteDance would retain a minority stake, but Chinese government sign-off remains uncertain.
• The transition could reshape the experience for 170 million American users by altering content discovery and cross-border interactions, potentially prompting some to abandon the platform.