Social media app TikTok is in the middle of the battle of its life. The platform is currently facing opposition from several lawmakers who crafted legislation looking to ban the platform in the U.S., which Congress is planning to vote on on March 13.
And now, with TikTok’s future up in the air, it looks like its potential downfall has attracted the attention of potential buyers, one who may have an interest in using data from the platform’s users to help train its artificial intelligence models.
Former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has “expressed interest” to ByteDance co-founder Zhang Yiming that he is looking to buy TikTok from the parent company if it’s looking to sell the platform, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal.
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Kotick was CEO of Activision, which is home to the beloved game Call of Duty, for 32 years. He has come under fire in the past during his time at the video game company for allegedly failing to tackle alleged sexual misconduct that took place at the company’s workplace.
Kotick is also reportedly looking for partners for his plan to acquire TikTok and expressed the idea to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and others at an Allen & Co. conference last week. The report claims that “OpenAI could use TikTok to help train its AI models if a partner such as Kotick could raise the capital for such an acquisition.” The report also reveals that the cost to acquire TikTok could be “hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Training AI models often involves feeding data to algorithms to help it make accurate predictions or decisions. Many companies looking to train their AI models often look to harvest user data on their platforms to help develop these technologies, which has sparked backlash from users who want their data to remain private.
ByteDance has responded to the Journal’s report in a statement on March 10 by denying that it has been approached by potential buyers. In an English translation of the statement, ByteDance claimed that the detail in the report is “untrue” as “Yiming has not communicated relevant matters with anyone.”
TikTok is getting the boot from U.S. lawmakers as they claim in a proposed bipartisan bill that banning the platform would “protect the national security of the United States.”
Lawmakers have expressed concerns that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, may give the Chinese government access to sensitive user data on the platform and that the platform itself may contribute to the spread of misinformation online, accusations that TikTok’s CEO has denied.
After the bill started progressing in Congress, TikTok began sending users a notice on its platform that the app is “at risk of being shut down in the U.S.,” and that users should call their local congressional representative and “speak up now” before their right of “free expression” is taken away.
TikTok also claimed in the notification that banning the app could "damage millions of businesses, destroy the livelihoods of countless creators across the country, and deny artists an audience."
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