We knew it would happen, but it sure did take a while, huh? TikTok confirmed on Thursday that its Chinese owner, ByteDance, had struck a deal with a group of non-Chinese investors to create a new American TikTok—the day before the Trump administration's executive order banning the app was set to kick in. The announcement concludes a six-year legal saga that saw the app banned by Congress and ensnared in politicking between two global superpowers.

The agreement, which was hammered out over more than a year, resolves existential questions about TikTok’s future. The app—with its unceasing feed of lip-syncs, political endorsements, conspiracy theories and skin care tutorials—would have been forced to leave the American market if it did not separate from its parent company.

With the deal, U.S. tech giant Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based investment firm MGX will collectively own 45% of the U.S. entity, which will be called “TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC.” Around one-third of the company will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors, some of which are American firms. And nearly 20% of the joint venture will be retained by ByteDance.

The new joint venture will be responsible for U.S. data protection, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurance. They’ll technically license the company’s algorithm from ByteDance and will retrain it on American user data to ensure the content we see is free from outside manipulation, the company has said. After the deal closes, Oracle will act as the security partner responsible for auditing and validating compliance with the agreed-upon national security terms.

The deal values TikTok U.S. at around $14 billion, a source confirmed to Axios, which is an extremely low price given that TikTok’s U.S. entity makes roughly $14 billion annually in advertising revenues alone, per analyst estimates. President Donald Trump celebrated the announcement in a post on Truth Social, calling it a “dramatic, final, and beautiful” conclusion. “I am so happy to have helped in saving TikTok!” he wrote, adding, “I only hope that long into the future I will be remembered by those who use and love TikTok.”

The U.S. has officially completed its withdrawal from the World Health Organization, the Department of Health and Human Services said on Thursday, finalizing a longstanding goal of President Trump. You may recall, that he tried to leave WHO during his first term, then gave notice through an executive order on the first day of his second term that the U.S. would exit ASAP. By law, the U.S. must give WHO a one-year notice and pay all outstanding fees before its departure. We apparently still owe WHO roughly $260 million, but legal experts said the U.S. is unlikely to pay up and the organization has little recourse.

Why? A senior HHS official told ABC News that WHO “strayed from its core mission and has acted contrary to the U.S. interests in protecting the U.S. public on multiple occasions.” The HHS focused much of its critique on WHO’s actions during the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming the organization unfairly criticized Trump for actions such as shutting down travel from certain foreign countries during the early days of the pandemic.

The withdrawal will hurt the global response to new outbreaks and will hobble the ability of U.S. scientists and pharmaceutical companies to develop vaccines and medicines against new threats, said Lawrence Gostin, a public health law expert at Georgetown University told the Associated Press. The effects on U.S. and global health “will be a slow bleed,” says Dr. Judd Walson, chair of international health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Most Americans will not wake up on Jan. 23 and say, ‘Look what happened when the U.S. withdrew from WHO.’ But the problem is that the impacts will be difficult to reverse once they happen.”

Humane’s Ai Pin might be dead and gone, but its awful legacy may live on thanks to the company you’d least expect. According to a new report from The Information, Apple is currently developing its own AI pin to follow Humane’s now-defunct and bricked Ai Pin. Hooray for the sequel no one asked for?

According to CNET, the device would reportedly include two cameras, three microphones, a speaker and a physical button. Presumably, it would pair with devices like iPhones to give access to the data it's collecting, such as photos, videos and audio. It's easy to imagine a device that uses whatever comes out of Apple’s partnership with Google’s Gemini AI to ask questions on the go or look up information from your phone.

That’s quite a bit of info, but I still have lots of questions. For one, how does this thing attach? An actual pin? Magnets? But tech folk say that’s not the problem. Engadget asks, “If Apple's AI pin serves as a conduit to Siri, is it really that much more convenient than using an iPhone, AirPods or even an Apple Watch to do the same?” Gizmodo adds that AI gadgets are “about as unproven a category as it gets in the tech world, and rushing to get in on that unproven craze feels shortsighted,” to say the least.

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