Well yeah, their statements thus far have been:

• “We would rather go dark than sell”

• “We are not China Centralized.”

So if that cat gets out of the bag that both those statements are false they will lose all leverage during attempts to sell.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Sources “with direct knowledge” of the project—granted anonymity because they’re not authorized to discuss it publicly—told Reuters that the TikTok effort began late last year.

They said that the project will likely take a year to complete, requiring hundreds of engineers to separate millions of lines of code.

“The Reuters story published today is misleading and factually inaccurate,” the TikTok Policy account posted on X (formerly Twitter).

"As we said in our court filing, the ‘qualified divestiture’ demanded by the Act to allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States is simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally.

However, in the meantime, sources told Reuters that TikTok is seemingly exploring all its options to avoid running afoul of the US law, including separating its code base and even once considering open-sourcing parts of its algorithm to increase transparency.

“Compliance and legal issues involved with determining what parts of the code can be carried over to TikTok are complicating the work,” one source told Reuters.

The original article contains 578 words, the summary contains 167 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Fascism. All of you clap while you set precedent for banning speech and am ACTUAL attack on the 1st.