Trump and Xi are expected to finalize a long-sought TikTok deal today

(CNN) –President Donald Trump and China’s leader Xi Jinping are set to finalize a deal Friday that would sell most of TikTok’s US assets to American investors. The deal, if reached, would conclude a yearslong effort that began during Trump’s first term and became a key factor in broader negotiations between the United States and China in recent months.

On Monday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Li Chenggang, China’s vice minister of commerce, said that a framework TikTok sale agreement had been reached during negotiations held in Madrid between diplomats from both countries. The proposal would allow TikTok to remain operational in the United States. Former President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan bill passed by Congress that went into effect on January 19 banning TikTok unless it ceded control of at least 80% of its assets to US operators. But Trump multiple times paused the ban as his administration sought a sale via a deal with China.

Neither side has disclosed terms of the agreement, because it has not been finalized. But sources familiar with the framework said the proposal would involve investments from a number of US-based venture capital firms, private equity funds and tech companies. Among the investors, who would hold the majority stake in the company, are Oracle, Andreessen Horowitz and Silver Lake, the sources said. Chinese investors would own the remaining 20% of the company.

The new consortium would be operated by a majority-US board, including a member appointed by the Trump administration. The Wall Street Journal first reported on details of the framework.

“Any details of the TikTok framework are pure speculation unless they are announced by this administration,” a senior White House official told CNN. TikTok and its parent company ByteDance have not responded to CNN’s requests for comment about the status of a deal.

The agreement and conversation is a precursor to a Trump-Xi meeting that both sides have sought for months, US officials said Monday after the framework plan was announced. Without a TikTok deal in place, a meeting between Trump and Xi wouldn’t be possible, US officials said. An agreement makes it more likely the two leaders will sit down when Trump visits Asia at the end of October, according to those officials.

China, up until this point, has been hesitant to allow ByteDance to give up its US stake. But as trade tensions between the companies reached an inflection point in the spring and continued throughout the summer – evidenced by China’s announcement Monday that Nvidia had violated its antitrust laws – Chinese authorities apparently decided that it should play ball.

The bulk of the deal — organizing an American-led investor group to buy TikTok’s US assets – had been completed by April, Bessent said Monday. But then Trump’s massive “Liberation Day” tariffs went into effect, effectively putting an embargo on all Chinese goods, and TikTok talks entered a standstill. After tariffs were brought lower and talks between the US and China resumed, Bessent said both Trump and Xi expressed interest in re-engaging on TikTok discussions. But key details needed to be ironed out, including addressing US national security concerns and China’s willingness to approve the deal.

TikTok briefly went dark in the United States on January 18, the day before the Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act went into effect. But on January 19, one day before Trump took office for his second term, he said he would sign an executive action upon the beginning of his term that would ensure US companies would not be punished for hosting TikTok on their app stores or servers.

The law gives the president broad discretion on how to enforce the ban, and Trump has pushed back the enforcement date four times – most recently to mid-December. But critics have said Trump’s extensions thwarted the will of Congress.

Trump toward the end of his first term had advocated for banning TikTok — a policy he never got passed but which Biden eventually supported and signed into law. But Trump’s opinion eventually changed after he viewed the social media app as contributing to his election victory in 2024.

TikTok boasts around 170 million US users, many of them young people – a contingent that offered significantly more support to the Republican presidential candidate in the 2024 election than that segment of the population has in recent years. Trump has repeatedly said a deal is close, but no breakthrough emerged until Monday.