The proposal, submitted last week, is a revision of an earlier plan the artificial intelligence startup presented to TikTok's parent ByteDance on 18 January, a day before the law that bans TikTok went into effect.

U.S. search engine startup Perplexity AI has revised the merger proposal it had submitted to TikTok's Chinese parent ByteDance to create a new entity combining Perplexity and TikTok U.S., a person familiar with the proposal told Reuters on Sunday.

If the plan is successful, the shares of TikTok owned by the government would not have voting power, the person said.

According to Reuters, the deal being negotiated by the White House would see ByteDance retaining a stake in the company — either the U.S. or global operations — but data collection and software updates would be overseen by Oracle, which already provides hosting for TikTok.

The Trump administration is denying it, but Trump previously said he'd like to see the software company take it over.