Nearly a year after the deal to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations officially closed, the newly created company, TikTok USDS Joint Venture, still leans heavily on technology and practices inherited from its Chinese former owner, according to interviews and internal materials reviewed by Politico.
Politico reports that the sale closed in January 2026, and the new American entity was formally established that same month. But U.S. employees still communicate using Lark, the internal chat system built by ByteDance, and now rely on an AI assistant called Aime, also built by ByteDance, which operates inside that same chat platform.
“There is a necessity to be able to speak to our global colleagues, but I can think of a thousand different ways we would be able to do that that wouldn’t necessarily violate at least the spirit of this agreement,” one TikTok employee said, describing ongoing communication with global TikTok colleagues via Lark.
Congress forced ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. business in 2024 over fears about the platform’s ties to data collection and the Chinese Communist Party. ByteDance has denied any such ties. In a 2024 legal filing, the Justice Department argued that TikTok employees had sent “significant amounts of restricted U.S. user data” to one another through Lark.
The overlap goes beyond software. Inside TikTok’s office buildings, U.S. employees must be chaperoned to visit TikTok’s global offices on other floors, and they’re barred from bringing laptops into those spaces. The platform serves roughly 200 million Americans.
IN January, TikTok USDS Joint Venture issued an announcement outlining safeguards for U.S. users, with a spokesperson saying the entity “will operate under defined safeguards.” An internal post describes how policy decisions get made after the split, stated: “Our core principle remains to stay as aligned with global standards as possible, to preserve the global experience.”
Since the deal closed, TikTok US has issued employees new email addresses and ended restricted stock units previously granted by ByteDance, replacing them with a profit-sharing plan that pays cash bonuses tied to operating profits. TikTok US now holds final say over enforcing content policies for American users, and the company says it will “retrain, test, and update the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data,” secured within Oracle’s U.S. cloud environment. Whether that algorithm was licensed from ByteDance, or is still maintained by ByteDance engineers, remains unclear.
Legal and reputational pressures continue. In August, TikTok agreed to settle a children’s privacy lawsuit with the Justice Department for $400 million, and Pennsylvania’s attorney general sued the company that same month over allegedly addictive platform design. TikTok has since announced partnerships with two child safety groups, rejoined the tech lobbying group NetChoice after previously being removed under GOP pressure, and became a member of Technet, a Washington-based policy organization.
Read more at Politico here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.