Details of a potential deal emerge as the TikTok deadline approaches

Vice President JDVance announced on Thursday that an announcement would be made by the administration regarding TikTok before Saturday. According to a federal law passed in 2017 to address national security concerns about TikTok, its Chinese owner ByteDance and the app, it was required that the app be sold or blocked by January. Mr. Trump delayed the implementation of that law until April 5, 2019. Trump met with top officials in the White House to discuss a proposal regarding TikTok. While Amazon has shown interest in TikTok, the Trump administration wants to avoid selling the entire company. The plan would be to spin out TikTok into a new company and bring on new American investors to reduce the ownership stakes of Chinese investors.

The private-equity giant Blackstone and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz are considering investments, they said. Two people said that the private equity firm Silver Lake is also considering an investment. Three people said that current investors like Susquehanna, General Atlantic and Oracle would retain a stake, and Oracle would continue to manage TikTok data in a more operational capacity. Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment. Andreessen Horowitz declined comment.

A White House spokeswoman said that any announcement about TikTok will come from Mr. Trump, but declined to provide details.

Many of the aspects of the deal being considered remain murky. It’s unclear what will happen with TikTok’s highly coveted algorithm. According to the law, a new TikTok entity cannot cooperate with ByteDance “with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm” or for data sharing. Under the law, a new TikTok entity cannot cooperate with ByteDance “with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm” or for data sharing.

“Congress said that for national security purposes, there has to be an operational severing between China, this new entity and the algorithm,” said Jim Secreto, a former counselor for investment security at the Treasury Department, who helped shape the Biden administration’s policy on TikTok. TikTok, which spent most of the last year trying and failing to defeat the law in courts, has maintained that it is not for sale, in part because the Chinese government would block a transaction. The Chinese government’s latest stance on TikTok is unclear. The Chinese government’s latest stance on TikTok is unclear.

Questions over the deal’s legal uncertainty have prompted some of the firms interested in investing in TikTok to look for indemnification for their investments, one of the people said.

Congress, which passed the TikTok law in a rare bipartisan vote, may not support the deal Mr. Trump is eyeing.

Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, said on Wednesday that he was skeptical of a deal that kept control of the app’s video recommendation algorithm inside China.

“If you can get a deal to actually sell the company and it meets the terms that the statute sets out, that’s fantastic; that’s great,” he said. “But if you can’t, then I think that you have to enforce the statute and banning TikTok.” This middle way, I don’t think is viable.”

David McCabe and Theodore Schleifer contributed reporting from Washington.

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