Trump and Xi will seek to "consummate" the agreement to allow TikTok to operate legally in the US.

US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will seek to "consummate" the agreement between Washington and the parent company of the popular video platform, ByteDance, to allow TikTok to operate legally in the United States, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday.

Trump and Xi are scheduled to meet in South Korea on October 30, the final stop of the Republican's Asian tour. This face-to-face meeting provides an opportunity for the two powers to ease tensions following their disagreement over Beijing's announcement of restrictions on the sale of its rare earths.

"We have reached a definitive agreement on TikTok. We signed one in Madrid, and I believe that as of today all the details are resolved and it will be the responsibility of the two leaders to consummate the transaction on Thursday in Korea," Bessent told CBS, following "successful" trade talks in Malaysia with his Chinese counterparts.

Last September, the US reached an agreement with Beijing-backed ByteDance to allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States and comply with a congressional mandate, which in 2024 mandated that the Chinese-owned app be shut down due to the risk it posed to US national security.

The agreement establishes the creation of a joint venture with a majority of US ownership, with operations sufficiently separate from its Chinese parent company—it will retain a 20% stake—especially with regard to the Chinese government's access to servers that store user data.

Shortly after, Trump signed an executive order paving the way for the new corporate structure, with majority US investors including the directors of Dell and Oracle, the latter responsible for securing TikTok's algorithm and data storage on its servers.

Washington offered no further details about the deal at the time. In his interview from Kuala Lumpur, Bessent also declined to go into specific details, clarifying that it was not part of the "commercial aspect of the transaction."

"My mission was to get the Chinese to approve the transaction, and I think we successfully achieved that in the last two days," he insisted.