TikTok will be shut down if Oracle deal meeting U.S. security needs can't be closed: Mnuchin

(Washington) U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said if Oracle's deal for TikTok cannot be closed with terms that meet U.S. security requirements, including holding code in the United States, the short video app will be shut down.

"All of the code will have to be in the United States. Oracle will be responsible for rebuilding the code, sanitizing the code, making sure it's safe in their cloud, and ...it'll satisfy all of our requirements," Mnuchin told a CNBC investor conference.

Earlier, ByteDance and Oracle Corp issued conflicting statements over the terms of an agreement they reached with the White House over the weekend to allow TikTok to continue to operate in the United States, casting doubt on President Donald Trump's preliminary blessing of the deal.

China's ByteDance was racing to avoid a crackdown on its popular short-video app after the U.S. Commerce Department said on Friday it would block new downloads and updates to the app. U.S. officials had expressed concern that the personal data of as many as 100 million Americans that use the app was being passed on to China's Communist Party government.

A successful deal would allow Trump to drop his threat of shutting down TikTok and avoid alienating its army of young users ahead of the Nov. 3 U.S. election.