Due to security concerns, President Donald Trump has been trying to ban the Chinese-owned app TikTok since August. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, and with a new deal created by Mr. Trump, a combined 20 percent stake would be bought by Oracle and Walmart, in the form of the new company TikTok Global. With roughly 100 million TikTok users in the U.S., Mr. Trump says that unless an American company takes control of the US operations, Beijing will have all the personal information of Americans. This is due to a Chinese security law that requires Chinese companies to provide the government with any information on its users that is requested.

TikTok Global could be valued at up to $60 billion, and Oracle and Walmart have also stated that over 25,000 new jobs will be created in the US. Oracle is a computer software company, which sells various technologies, such as cloud engineered systems and enterprise software products. Oracle would hold a 12.5 percent stake as a minority investor, and Walmart with a 7.5 percent stake.

“I have given the deal my blessing,” Mr. Trump said to White House reporters. “If they get it done, that’s great. If they don’t, that’s okay, too. But it’s a great deal for America, and very interesting.”

This deal is counterintuitive towards Mr. Trump’s plans to secure privacy since ByteDance would still own 80 percent of the new company, which would mean it is still technically a Chinese company. Mr. Trump also stated that the deal would include a $5 billion fund for U.S. education, but did not mention which companies would be making the payment. Oracle and Walmart have not said anything following this announcement. ByteDance had heard about this education fund for the first time as well.

“Some news media reported that TikTok will set up a $5 billion education fund in the United States,” ByteDance said in a statement posted to Chinese social media. “We would like to clarify that it was also our first time hearing about the news.”

The U.S. and China have grown farther apart under Mr. Trump, and this deal will further affect their relationship. The outcome of this will have major geopolitical consequences. Due to more security breach allegations, The U.S. government has been conducting a campaign against Huawei, another Chinese-owned company, which makes smartphones and a variety of other equipment for 5G wireless networks. The popular app WeChat was also attempted to be banned in the U.S. based on similar spying claims but was halted by a federal judge in California with an injunction. Senator Marco Rubio (R) has spoken up about these accusations.

“I think Oracle worked really hard to put together the best deal possible,” Mr. Rubio said during an interview with Fox News. “If China continues to control the code, as I understand they would in this deal, they could put in that code an instruction to secretly send data back to China, to the mainland. There can be something embedded in that code that sends it the other way.”

If the ban had gone through, users would be able to keep TikTok on their phones and continue to watch and post videos, but no new updates or downloads would be allowed. This could cause several glitches and problems in the future. Fearing that the users would lose access to the app, downloads in the U.S. rose to 12 percent between Thursday and Friday.