The US government has confirmed that it received a bid from Oracle for TikTok’s American operations after the video-sharing app’s parent ByteDance rejected a proposal from Microsoft, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Monday.
Steven Mnuchin told CNBC his office received the proposal involving Oracle over the weekend and said the bid would be handled by a government panel that reviews foreign transactions for national security concerns.
Oracle confirmed the submission, saying the company “is part of the proposal by ByteDance to the Treasury Department over the weekend in which Oracle will serve as the trusted technology provider.”
President Donald Trump’s administration has sought the sale of TikTok from ByteDance, citing concerns about US data security.
The transaction is being structured as a partnership and probably won’t be an outright sale, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed sources.
Mnuchin said, “I will confirm that we did get a proposal over the weekend that includes Oracle as the trusted technology partner,”
He added, “We will be reviewing that at the committee this week and then we’ll be making a recommendation to the president and reviewing it with him.”
Mnuchin concluded, “We need to make sure that the code is, one, secure, Americans’ data are secure, phones are secure, and we’ll be having discussions with Oracle over the next few days with our technical teams.”
Mnuchin declined to go into detail on the bid.
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