President Donald Trump’s plan to save TikTok for Americans casts Oracle Corp. as the security guard for U.S. user data and the app’s all-important algorithm.

“Oracle is playing a very big part. Oracle really understands this,” Trump said from the Oval Office this week. “So I think it’s going to be very well protected.” White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said Friday that Oracle would function as “the great firewall of America.”

But TikTok, owned by China-based ByteDance Ltd., and Oracle have spent several years and billions of dollars working together to safeguard TikTok U.S. data as part of a partnership known as “Project Texas” — an arrangement that looks strikingly similar to the one laid out by Trump this week.

Those similarities are raising concerns among security experts and China hawks who fear Trump’s newly announced plan doesn’t go far enough to protect the privacy of Americans. The Biden administration rejected “Project Texas” as insufficient at addressing U.S. national security concerns, and now critics are arguing that the new TikTok-Oracle solution is more of the same.

“This is Project Texas 2.0, with some additional bells and whistles to try to argue that it complies with the law that Congress passed,” said Jim Secreto, a former Treasury Department and national security official who helped shape the Biden administration’s approach to TikTok. He called the deal “a cosmetic fix that trades long-term security for short-term optics.”

Data security is at the very heart of the U.S. law that threatens to ban TikTok. Lawmakers have warned that the popular video app’s U.S. user data could be collected by the Chinese government for nefarious reasons, including surveilling or building dossiers on American citizens. They’ve also argued that TikTok’s content recommendation algorithm could be abused to push divisive narratives on U.S. users.

Oracle’s role is therefore key to solving TikTok’s alleged security concerns in the U.S.

Under the deal, TikTok’s U.S. operations would be sold to a group likely to include Oracle, Silver Lake Management, Abu Dhabi-based MGX and existing American investors. ByteDance would retain just under 20% as required by a 2024 law passed by Congress and signed by then President Joe Biden. The proposed sale calls for Oracle to serve as a security consultant for the newly formed TikTok U.S. entity. That will mean inspecting a new content recommendation algorithm, leased by ByteDance, to determine how it’s feeding material to users to ensure it’s not being used for malicious purposes. Data from U.S. users would be stored in a secure cloud managed by Oracle with controls aimed at preventing access by ByteDance, a senior White House official said.

Representatives of TikTok and Oracle didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Project Texas

It’s not the first time that Oracle has been tasked with solving these very same challenges. When Trump tried to force a sale of the app in 2020 over similar security concerns, TikTok came up with a plan to attach itself to a reputable American tech company with a goal of keeping U.S. TikTokers’ data private from ByteDance. The resulting Project Texas, a multibillion partnership between TikTok and Oracle, was announced in 2022. “The entire structure of this plan is based on one simple principle: You won’t have to take our word for it,” TikTok said at the time.

Under that arrangement, Oracle agreed to store Americans’ TikTok data in its secure U.S. cloud, tightly controlling anything coming in or out and monitoring for unauthorized access or leaks. Oracle also agreed to inspect the app’s algorithm and source code for signs of outside meddling. TikTok, meanwhile, spun out a new subsidiary to oversee much of its stateside operations and the Oracle relationship.

TikTok believed that Oracle’s oversight would be enough to convince the U.S. government that the country’s interests were being protected.

But the framework, which was proposed to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., was more complicated in practice. TikTok is built on ByteDance technology, so severing one from the other was technically near impossible. Some sensitive information about Americans was safeguarded under Project Texas, but not all. And although TikTok emphasized that Oracle and third-party reviewers would be legally required to report any missteps to the U.S. government, some worried about regulators’ ability to verify compliance with the agreement or catch China if it were violating its terms.

The Biden administration ultimately rejected Project Texas as an antidote to TikTok’s security problems. Later, a legal brief from the U.S. Justice Department suggested that the Project Texas arrangement was wholly inadequate. “The suggestion that reviewing the source code would be sufficient ignores the size and complexity of the code,” the department said in the brief. It would require resources far beyond what Oracle possesses to ensure security of the U.S. data, according to the filing.

Even Adam Presser, TikTok’s head of operations and trust and safety, argued in a 2024 legal filing that “a severance of the U.S. TikTok platform from the rest of the globally integrated TikTok platform and business is not feasible.” He listed the commercial and technical reasons TikTok U.S. couldn’t be completely untangled from ByteDance.

“The U.S. TikTok platform would become an ‘island’ where Americans would have an experience isolated from the rest of the global platform,” Presser said. The app would be less attractive to global advertisers and creators, and wouldn’t generate enough revenue to make a U.S.-only TikTok financially sustainable, he added.

Finally, “the code base supporting the TikTok platform includes billions of lines of code that have been developed over multiple years by a team of thousands of global engineers, including in China,” Presser said in the legal filing. “None of those thousands of ByteDance employees would be permitted to continue to support TikTok in the United States. Under those circumstances, there is no question that it would take at least several years for an entirely new set of engineers to gain sufficient familiarity with the source code to perform the ongoing, necessary maintenance and development activities for the platform. Even then, such a newly created team of engineers would need access to custom-made ByteDance software tools, which the Act prohibits.”

Without a satisfactory security plan in place, Congress last year passed the first-of-its-kind bipartisan law targeting social media apps controlled by foreign adversaries, requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok U.S. or see its crown jewel shut down nationwide. With few details of the proposed plan announced by Trump made publicly available, it's unclear if or how the issues raised in the legal filings may be addressed.

Oracle again

Despite the shortcomings of Project Texas, Trump’s plan to “save” TikTok hinges almost entirely on the newly announced but very similar relationship with Oracle. That’s not lost on Washington, where some on Capitol Hill are already expressing skepticism.

“I will be conducting full oversight over this agreement, starting with an urgent briefing I have requested from the administration,” Republican Representative John Moolenaar, chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said Friday in a statement. Moolenaar said the proposed framework “could mitigate some of the ByteDance threat depending on the details” but remained skeptical that the arrangement cut operational ties between ByteDance and the new TikTok entity as the law requires. He said he would hold a hearing with leaders of that new entity next year.

Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the nonpartisan Foundation for Defense of Democracies, described the proposed TikTok framework as “Project Texas with new paint.”

Most concerning to critics of the proposed deal is the plan for the newly created U.S. TikTok to license ByteDance’s content algorithm, which it plans to use as a framework for building its own version of the software by retraining it on U.S. data. The new entity would then control the algorithm with oversight from Oracle.

Not everyone is convinced that this plan will properly exclude ByteDance from the picture. Under the proposed deal, ByteDance will still own just less than 20% of the new U.S. TikTok, have a board seat, and share in the app’s profits.

Singleton is among those who remain skeptical. “A board seat for ByteDance or any continued role in maintaining the algorithm would flout Congress’s mandate and repeat the very flaws CFIUS already rejected with Project Texas,” he said.

(With assistance from Josh Wingrove.)

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