Nearly a year after the deal to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations officially closed, the newly created company, TikTok USDS Joint Venture, still leans heavily on technology and practices inherited from its Chinese former owner, according to interviews and internal materials reviewed by Politico.
\n\nPolitico reports that the sale closed in January 2026, and the new American entity was formally established that same month. But U.S. employees still communicate using Lark, the internal chat system built by ByteDance, and now rely on an AI assistant called Aime, also built by ByteDance, which operates inside that same chat platform.
\n\n“There is a necessity to be able to speak to our global colleagues, but I can think of a thousand different ways we would be able to do that that wouldn’t necessarily violate at least the spirit of this agreement,” one TikTok employee said, describing ongoing communication with global TikTok colleagues via Lark.
\n\nCongress forced ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. business in 2024 over fears about the platform’s ties to data collection and the Chinese Communist Party. ByteDance has denied any such ties. In a 2024 legal filing, the Justice Department argued that TikTok employees had sent “significant amounts of restricted U.S. user…
Original source: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/
