On Sept. 25, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order that he says will allow TikTok to continue operating in the country while complying with national security concerns. After a phone call with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Sept. 19, Trump said he had reached an agreement for a U.S. investor group led by Oracle to take control of 80 percent of TikTok’s U.S. operations. But as details have come to light, serious questions are surfacing.
For one, the national security concerns that led Congress to pass a law banning TikTok in the first place are left unresolved. TikTok’s algorithm—its “secret sauce” governing what users see on the app and possibly serving as a key weapon for Chinese influence operations—will remain in ByteDance’s hands. Under the deal, a copy of will be licensed to the U.S. investor group, which will then retrain it using data from users based in the United States.
But that still leaves a big loophole. What happens, for example, when ByteDance releases updates to its algorithm? Will the U.S. version continue to be updated to operate in parallel with the Bytedance version of the app? Rather than cutting ties with China, the deal allows Beijing to retain considerable influence.
Trump’s administration is expected to collect billions in fees from the transaction. As Trump has described it, “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 addition, control of the app would be off-loaded in a nontransparent process to Trump’s handpicked allies, with Larry Ellison and Rupert Murdoch linked to the investor group. This strikes many observers as a classic case of crony capitalism.
“The TikTok deal doesn’t look open to all market participants,” said Rush Doshi, a former national security official under President Joe Biden, in an interview with the Post. “It seems like it’s open mostly to those close to the administration already, including its political supporters.” Trump’s cherry-picked board not only would give his political allies a financial boost but would also open the door for partisan content-moderation decisions that could amplify pro-Trump views while suppressing critics—the very issues raised by current and former U.S. officials about Chinese ownership.
This head-spinning sequence of events leading to the TikTok executive order, as well as other recent deals struck by Trump, raise a larger question: Is the U.S. president abandoning America’s tech war against China?
It was Trump himself who was responsible for initiating the tech war in 2018 by placing Chinese tech giant ZTE on a trade blacklist, which essentially imposed a “death sentence” on the company. Back then, national security experts criticized former President Barack Obama for being too slow to recognize the risk from China. They argued that he was distracted by Syria’s civil war, the wreckage of Libya, Iran’s nuclear program, and the Islamic State threat, whereas Trump had recognized the true dangers of Beijing’s growing power.
So far in his second term, Trump has tacked in a very different direction.
When Trump returned to office in January, the United States’ tech war against China was in full swing. Over the prior four years, Biden had tightened export controls against Beijing to an unprecedented degree. Stopping the proliferation of advanced semiconductor chips became a singular preoccupation. Multiple rules attempted to squeeze China’s capacity to obtain cutting-edge microchips, necessary to power large artificial intelligence (AI) models or sophisticated military equipment.
The New York Times described Biden’s efforts as akin to a “declaration of economic war on China.” For Biden officials, the strategy was simple: preserve “as large of a lead as possible” against Chinese technology using an array of export controls, coordinate with allies to choke off Beijing’s access to high technology, and subsidize chipmaking at home. When Chinese officials objected in meetings to the United States’ tech controls, the Times reported that U.S. officials responded that these measures were “national security matters” and not open for discussion.
As Biden’s term drew to a close, he had an additional card to play. Just days before Trump’s inauguration, his administration released an AI diffusion rule governing how models and chips could be shared with foreign countries. It was a bold attempt to keep AI technology squarely in the hands of the United States and its allies and to prevent Washington’s principal rivals—China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela—from receiving sensitive technology that could enhance their militaries or be used to carry out cyberattacks against the United States.
Analysts expected that Trump would largely keep the counter-China strategy in place. Yet from the outset, Trump appeared far more preoccupied with imposing tariffs on Canada, Mexico, or Europe to reduce the trade deficit than with counterbalancing China or Russia. (In fact, while Trump threatened to penalize Russia if President Vladimir Putin didn’t seek peace in Ukraine, he has yet to issue any new sanctions against Russian goods or services.)
Trump’s team of political appointments also reflected a changed mindset. The tech officials sitting at the top of his administration—White House AI czar David Sacks and senior science and technology advisor Michael Kratsios—take a dim view of export controls.
These advisors have argued that the best strategy for the United States was to expand aggressively into foreign markets, sign deals with governments to lock in U.S. tech, and exploit commercial advantages to secure “global technological dominance.” Unsurprisingly, by May, Trump’s team ditched Biden’s AI diffusion rule.
Meanwhile, the China hawks within the administration, led by then-National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, found themselves sidelined. In April, far-right influencer Laura Loomer met with Trump in the White House and presented him with a list of people whom she believed were disloyal to his agenda. Many people on the list were National Security Council officials working for Waltz. After the meeting, Trump immediately fired six of the council’s staff members. Several weeks later, he ousted Waltz from his post.
Not only did Sacks find himself with far freer rein to push his agenda, but Trump also fell increasingly under the sway of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Huang had gone on what the New York Times described as a “lobbying blitz” in Washington to push back against AI export controls.
Huang argued that banning U.S. tech from China had backfired, giving China a greater urgency to develop its own products. He contended that the Chinese military wouldn’t use Nvidia chips and even pushed back against describing China as an adversary, calling Beijing a “competitor” but “not our enemy.”
Huang’s views proved persuasive. One of Nvidia’s biggest requests was for Trump to overturn an earlier decision to ban sales to China of the company’s H20 chip, which is critical for AI inference processing. In June, following a White House visit from Huang, Trump issued a reversal, although it came with a catch. Nvidia and another semiconductor company, AMD, would each give Washington a 15 percent cut of their revenues from their chip sales to China in exchange for permission to resume those transactions.
“I said ‘I want 20 percent if I’m going to approve this for you,’” Trump told reporters. “For the country, for our country. I don’t want it myself. … And he [Huang] said ‘Would you make it 15?’ So we negotiate a little deal.”
Since coming back into office, Trump has repeatedly downgraded national security in favor of economic interests. Trump’s May trip to the Middle East, where he stopped in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, is a good case in point. The main goal of the visit was to broker billions worth of AI deals. In the UAE, Trump reached an agreement to build a gigantic data center complex in Abu Dhabi that could support up to 2.5 million Nvidia B200 chips, bigger than any other AI infrastructure project outside of the United States. (An Emirati investment firm is also expected to join the TikTok coalition.) Trump’s team reached a similar deal with Saudi Arabia, agreeing to sell hundreds of thousands of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips to the newly created AI start-up Humain, overseen by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.
Concerns about the wisdom of handing over a scarce strategic resource to untrustworthy partners—or worries that Chinese companies would access the Gulf’s new computing power to train their own models—were pushed aside. As Sacks put it in a podcast interview in May, “The choice is, do we want these countries to be the piggy bank for American AI or for Chinese AI?”
It didn’t hurt that these deals proved to be personally lucrative for Trump’s family. Reporting from the New York Times disclosed that the Emirates had agreed to invest $2 billion in World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up in which Trump has a stake, while the AI chips deal was being negotiated. As with the Gulf AI deals and the TikTok agreement, Trump saw an opportunity to make a profit and seized it, notwithstanding the wider consequences.
At this point, it is no longer clear whether deterring China remains a top national security priority for Trump at all. Beginning in 2017, when he released his National Security Strategy and declared the return of “great power competition,” the United States’ primary focus has been to deter China and Russia. Yet the forthcoming National Defense Strategy reportedly turns that conception on its head. Rather than keeping China as the United States’ main security challenge, the document instead would prioritize protecting the homeland and the Western Hemisphere.
As a result, the signals coming out of the White House can be sharply contradictory. For months, Trump officials laid the groundwork for the release of a major policy statement—the White House AI action plan. Their goal was to provide a clear set of guidelines about how Trump would support this critical technology and ensure U.S. leadership.
The document was released in July; one of its main pillars was strengthening AI export controls. It cautioned that “denying our foreign adversaries access to this resource, then, is a matter of both geostrategic competition and national security.”
Yet just as the plan rolled out, Trump announced that he had lifted the ban on the sale of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China, allowing a critical AI technology to once again flow to the country. For the United States’ allies (as well as its rivals), it was hard to know what to make of this policy whiplash. Was the message that export controls still mattered? Or was Trump sending another signal—make the right deal with me and all rules are negotiable?
What is clear is that policy comes down to Trump and “whoever has last talked to him,” leading to a situation—described by scholars Abraham Newman and Henry Farrell—where “personalism replaces bureaucratic decision-making” and “short-term profit trumps long-term national interest.”
Where the U.S. tech war goes is anyone’s guess. While the bulk of the U.S. political establishment remains aligned against China and distrustful of Xi’s intentions, that counts for little in Trump’s Washington. Ultimately, he will have the final say. Currently, Trump is fixated on traveling to Beijing to meet with Xi in early 2026. The New York Times reported that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has already begun recruiting CEOs for a potential delegation, “setting off a competition over who will get to ride in Air Force One.”
In the lead-up to a such a meeting, Trump will be loath to push China too hard on export controls. Yet Xi won’t hesitate to exploit Trump’s eagerness for a high-profile Beijing visit to secure policy concessions, including loosened export controls on advanced chips, scaling back Washington’s support of Taiwan, and providing an “open and fair environment” for Chinese companies to invest in the United States. (Experts have roundly criticized Chinese investments in U.S. companies for enabling the theft of critical intellectual property.)
For now, the U.S. tech war hangs in the balance, with growing signs that Trump will jettison key components when the moment suits him.
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