In 2024, Congress passed a law saying that TikTok — and any other app owned by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance — would have to be sold, or they would be banned in the U.S., making good on a threat that President Trump made in 2020 and President Biden made in 2023.
Earlier this year, Trump ordered the Department of Justice not to enforce that law, a reprieve that has kept TikTok online past the law’s January deadline. But the non-enforcement order has done more than just ‘save’ TikTok: it has enabled its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to continue developing and introducing new products into markets in the U.S. and across the world.
In many cases, these products have focused on new uses for AI. In addition to new apps for the Chinese market, ByteDance has launched English-language tools like Trae, an AI coding assistant; Dreamina, an AI image generator; PicPic, a generator of “AI Replicas” or avatars, EasyOde, a music licensing platform, and an open source AI agent called Agent TARS. These tools come on the heels of earlier launches like hosting infrastructure tools Katalyst and KubeAdmiral and AI music generators Mawf and Ripple. Some of these products have not disclosed their ties to ByteDance, which often releases new apps under development through Singapore-based subsidiaries.
ByteDance’s flood of new products is, to some extent, just the company keeping up with its competition. Trae’s offerings, for example, are similar to the Microsoft juggernaut VS Code, while Dreamina’s are comparable to Midjourney and Google Veo. But the new apps also make clear that ByteDance will remain a central part of the geopolitical struggle for AI supremacy between the US and China.
As TikTok has exploded in popularity, ByteDance has taken efforts to distance the app from its Chinese roots. ByteDance has employed hundreds of people with ties to Chinese state media, including some who have worked on TikTok. But recently, manyByteDance executives — including founder Zhang Yiming — have relocated to Singapore, and the company has long proclaimed itself ‘born to be global,’ rather than Chinese.
Nevertheless, China is the profit center for ByteDance’s operations, and it has become the primary market for the company’s AI efforts. Last year, ByteDance’s Chinese ChatGPT competitor, Doubao, became China’s most popular chatbot. (It also complied more readily with state censorship dictates than other Chinese chatbots, according to a Fudan University research assessment.) The company appears to have further ambitions when it comes to AI: domain registration records show that for the past four years, a Chinese ByteDance subsidiary has owned the domain chinese.ai — though it appears the company has not yet activated the site.
ByteDance has also shown consistent interest in creating apps for children. Its homework helper app, Gauth, has remained available in the U.S. due to Trump’s nonenforcement order, but the Chinese tech giant has also tested other products focused on kids. For years, as Congress was considering whether and how to ban TikTok, ByteDance was running Rex and Friends, a children’s app for learning English. It also registered — but apparently never developed — the web domains byteprek.com, kids.app, and aikids.app.
Domain registrations also reveal a potential ByteDance pivot back to news apps. The company previously ran English-language news apps TopBuzz and News Republic, but discontinued them as TikTok rose to prominence. But in 2024, the ByteDance subsidiary Spring SG Pte. Ltd. (which currently distributes ByteDance’s Cici AI assistant app, among others) registered several additional news-related domains: buzzbriefnews.com, cubenewsai.com, and linkernewai.com
ByteDance did not respond to a detailed request for comment about its new products and domain registrations.
In just under a month, Trump’s third nonenforcement order allowing TikTok and ByteDance to keep operating in the U.S. will expire. Public discussion of the order has focused heavily on TikTok itself, but the law applies to all ByteDance’s apps. Today, those apps persist on millions of American devices, providing everything from video editing in CapCut to AI tutoring in Gauth to an agent self-executing code on a developer’s computer through TARS.
In the U.S., ByteDance has largely become synonymous with TikTok. But around the world, TikTok is just one of many of the company’s smash-hit products. Trump has said that he intends to broker a deal in which ByteDance would sell at least some of its interest in TikTok’s U.S. operations to a conglomerate of U.S. investors. One TikTok insider recently told Forbes that any such deal would likely go beyond TikTok and include other ByteDance apps, too.
Congress’s sell-or-ban law is about more than just TikTok: it will determine the fate of one of the world’s largest tech giants in the U.S. for years to come.