TikTok's U.S. operations will be controlled by Americans in a planned deal to spin the platform off from its Chinese owner, White House press secretary Karolina Leavitt said.

The TikTok app is seen on a tablet in Shanghai, China. File Photo by Aex Palvevski/EPA-EFE UPI

Sept. 20 (UPI) -- TikTok's U.S. operations will be controlled by Americans in a planned deal to spin off the wildly popular social media platform from its Chinese owners, White House press secretary Karolina Leavitt said Saturday.

Appearing Saturday on Fox News, Leravitt said Americans will be on six of the seven board seats and the algorithm of the app would also not be controlled by China.

There have been concerns about potential national security risks and data privacy issues linked to the app, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, including Chinese government surveillance of Americans and the Chinese government possibly influencing the content of 137 million monthly active U.S. users.

Overall, there are more than 1.8 billion monthly active users worldwide.

"This deal means that TikTok will be majority-owned by Americans in the United States," Leavitt said, exactly nine months after Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term as U.S. President.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Madrid this week worked to spin off ByteDance's U.S. TikTok operations.

On Friday, Trump said he finalized the deal in a call with China's President Xi Jinping, posting on Truth Social, and saying he "appreciate [sic] the TikTok approval."

Trump signed four 90-day extensions, including one Tuesday.

"So all of those details have already been agreed upon, now we just need this deal to be signed and that will be happening, I anticipate, in the coming days," Leavitt said.

Though the deal needs to be signed by all the parties, she said there is a 100% chance it will happen

Financial details of the deal have not been released.

With the algorithm, the value of U.S. operations is difficult to calculate, Forbes said in January. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives believes that $300 billion "could be conservative," though others list the valuation somewhere in between from $20 billion.

On Thursday, Trump said that the United States would get a "tremendous fee" for its part in brokering the deal.

"The people that are investing in it are among the greatest investors in the world - the biggest, the richest and they'll do a great job," Trump said at a joint news conference Thursday in England with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. "We're doing it in conjunction with China, but the United States is getting a tremendous fee-plus - I call it a fee-plus -- just for making the deal and I don't want to throw that out the window."

In the arrangement, China's ByteDance will hold less than 20% with the new investor group, which includes Oracle Corp., Andreessen Horowitz and the private equity firm Silver Lake Management LLC.

Oracle, which is a multinational technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas, will serve as TikTok's security provider and monitor the app for safety, working with the U.S. government. Data of American users will be stored in the U.S. with no access by China, Leavitt said.

"The data and privacy will be led by one of America's greatest tech companies, Oracle, and the algorithm will also be controlled by America as well," Leavitt said.

Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, became the world's richest person on Sept. 10, but Elon Musk was back on top at the end of the trading day, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. Ellison's wealth now is at $367 billion, behind Musk at $440 billion

American board members will have national security and cybersecurity credentials, and the board member chosen by ByteDance will be excluded from the security committee.

The platform, which began in 2016 as Douyin, is projected to have $18.49 billion in ad revenue in 2025, according to Demandsage.