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With the TikTok ban looming in less than a week, creators are scrambling to find a replacement. Many have simply migrated over to TikTok’s direct American competitors, like Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts. But another unlikely challenger has emerged: the Chinese-owned Xiaohongshu, a social media app often referred to as Red Note in English. 

While Red Note had previously catered almost exclusively to Chinese audiences, Americans are flooding onto the platform this week, making it the number one on the App Store for two days straight. Lemon8, a separate Chinese social media app owned by TikTok’s owner ByteDance, sits at number two. On those apps, Chinese influencers and fashionistas appear in between American newcomers showing off their woodworking or floating down the Mississippi River. 

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It is unlikely Americans will settle on Red Note or Lemon8 long term: They face the same regulatory pressures that TikTok does. But these apps’ ascendance does reveal an acute desire from Americans to find their next social media destination; their general wariness about TikTok’s top American competitors; and their discontent with a ban that many see as paternalistic. 

“It was a bit of a spite thing—and I also wanted to be one of the first people over there,” says Christina Shuler, an entrepreneur who runs the small business Glam Farmhouse and joined Red Note this week. “Hopefully I can be part of the crowd that maybe can change how our government views this whole situation.” 

TikTok’s Ban

TikTok’s likely shuttering stems from a bill passed by Congress last year, which forced the app’s parent company ByteDance to either sell it by Jan. 19, or face a ban in the U.S. TikTok took the law to court, arguing a violation of freedom of speech. But last week, Supreme Court Justices expressed skepticism about the company’s legal arguments. Because ByteDance has said it will not sell TikTok, the ban will likely go into effect Sunday. (The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that Chinese officials have discussed the possibility of allowing Elon Musk to invest in or run the company’s U.S. operations.)

Read More: TikTok’s Fate Arrives at the Supreme Court

So many users are looking to establish themselves on other platforms. American companies have been preparing for this influx: Snap, for instance, announced a new Monetization Program last month, which places ads within eligible creators’ videos. 

But this week, Red Note and Lemon8 seem to be the main beneficiaries. Red Note was founded in 2013 as an online shopping guide before pivoting towards social media and e-commerce. Over 300 million people use the app, which is filled with Mandarin speakers delivering travelogues, beauty tutorials, animal videos and language lessons. Red Note also has a live online marketplace, a format extremely common in Asia, but much less prevalent in the U.S. While some new users noted that the name Red Note seems to allude to Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, the company has stressed that the names are unconnected. 

Before this week, the few American users of Red Note had included musicians looking to tap into the Chinese market, like John Legend and Mariah Carey. This week, a wave of TikTokkers announced on that app that they would be migrating over to Red Note, and encouraged their followers to join them. 

Marcus Robinson, a 29-year-old fashion designer, created a Red Note account to share his thrifting adventures and promote his clothing company, P-13. He previously had accrued 21,000 followers on TikTok, and estimates that 40% of his brand’s sales came from that app. “I thought I was going to keep building and make a living ultimately,” he says.

Robinson heard about Red Note on TikTok, set up an account, and started posting. After just 36 hours on the app, he already has nearly 10,000 followers and 22,000 likes. He engages with his Mandarin-language followers thanks to translations and captions provided by CapCut, an AI-powered video editing app owned by ByteDance. “I honestly feel like my brand will grow a lot quicker than it did on TikTok,” he says. “They’re all asking for clothes, asking me to model clothes. Everything’s flying right now.” 

Shuler, the 32-year-old woodworker based in South Carolina, had been earning money from TikTok thanks to brand partnerships, the Creator Rewards program, and product commissions. Her first post on Red Note, in which she announced herself as a TikTok refugee and gave a tutorial on how to install a sliding barn door, received 10,000 likes. “Right now, everyone’s so positive and people are caring,” she says. Other videos containing the hashtag “TikTokrefugee” have been viewed 100 million times. 

Shuler says that her posts on Red Note are already performing better than those on the Meta platforms Instagram and Facebook. “Unless you pay Meta to promote your posts, they’re not really going to show it to people—so I’ve seen a significant drop in engagement on both of those platforms,” she says. “And Facebook is just a bunch of angry people on there. So it was refreshing to get on Red Note and know that my content was appreciated.” 

Shuler says she’s even been learning a few Mandarin phrases thanks to the app. Neither she nor Robinson are particularly concerned about the data privacy worries associated with Chinese apps. “If you’ve already bought anything from Temu or Shien, I feel like whatever data that they want, they probably already have,” she says. 

It is quite possible that Red Note’s honeymoon will be short-lived. Some users have expressed concern that Red Note will be quicker to censor content that is political, sexual or LBGTQ-related. And Red Note also faces a potential ban: While Congress’s Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act singles out TikTok and other ByteDance apps, it also regulates other “foreign adversary controlled applications.” 

“Nobody thinks rednote is a viable long-term replacement,” wrote one Redditor on Monday. “This is just a form of protest; a big middle finger to the US government and their billionaire masters.”

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Chinese users of Xiaohongshu, or Little Red Book, welcome Americans fleeing a feared TikTok ban.

Meta is pursuing a MAGA makeover, in the latest political pivot for a company that once banned the now-president-elect from its platforms.

The Biden Administration’s move on Jan. 13 to curb exports on the advanced computer chips used to power artificial intelligence (AI) arrived in the wake of two major events over the Christmas holidays that rattled the world of AI. 

First, OpenAI released its latest model, o3, which achieved an 88% on a set of difficult reasoning tests on which no AI system had previously scored above 32%. “All intuition about AI capabilities will need to get updated” in light of the results, said Francois Chollet, a former AI researcher at Google and a prominent skeptic of the argument that “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) would be achieved any time soon.

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Second, the Chinese company DeepSeek released an open-source AI model that outperformed any American open-source language model, including Meta’s Llama series. The achievement surprised many AI researchers and U.S. officials, who had believed China lagged behind in terms of AI capabilities. Somehow, DeepSeek had managed to create a world-class AI model in spite of a global embargo, led by the U.S. government, on the sale of advanced AI chips to China.

Taken together, the two developments made something clear: “I think AGI will probably get developed during this president’s term,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Bloomberg in January, meaning that technology powerful enough to carry out economically valuable work and make new scientific discoveries by itself would emerge in the next four years under U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. What’s more: China appeared to be catching up in the race to get there first. 

For some U.S. officials, those realizations only underlined what they had been arguing for years: restricting China’s access to AI was now essential for U.S. national security. Whichever superpower achieves AGI first, the thinking goes, is likely to obtain a decisive strategic advantage, reap new scientific discoveries, wield powerful new weapons and surveillance technologies, and leave its competitor’s economy in the rear-view mirror. 

Read More: AI Models Are Getting Smarter. New Tests Are Racing To Catch Up. 

Under Biden, the U.S. government had intensified a policy that began during Trump’s first term: using the power of export controls to limit the number of advanced chips that China could obtain to impede its attempts to reach parity with the U.S. on AI. Despite measures that made the export of advanced chips to China illegal in 2022, Beijing had nevertheless succeeded in stockpiling thousands of chips to build its own AI systems thanks to an international smuggling network. The pure power of DeepSeek v3 strongly suggested that those chips were being used to train AI at the cutting edge.

And so, with just a week until Trump’s return to the White House, the Biden Administration added finishing touches to its existing chip sanctions. The new rules attempt to make it even harder for China to obtain cutting-edge AI chips via smuggling, by establishing new quotas and license requirements for the sale of advanced chips to all but America’s closest allies. 

If the Trump Administration does not act to repeal the measure, the policy will take effect in 120 days. “I think it is quite likely that the Trump Administration will find this policy appealing, and the reason is that we are in a critical moment in AI technology competition with China,” says Greg Allen, director of the Wadhwani Center for AI and Advanced Technologies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank. Contrary to rumors of AI’s progress reaching a plateau, OpenAI’s o3 model shows new capabilities are continuing to emerge rapidly, Allen says, leading many in Washington and Silicon Valley to bring forward their predictions of when they think AGI will arrive. And while Trump himself is unpredictable, many of the aides and policymakers set to occupy senior positions in his Administration are China hawks. “It matters a lot that the United States gets there before China,” says Allen, who supports the Biden Administration’s new rules. “It is a pretty decisive move to make life much harder for China’s AI ecosystem.”

Read More: How Sam Altman Is Thinking About AGI in 2025.

Trump will face appeals from those urging him to repeal the new rules. Nvidia, which controls more than 90% of the U.S. AI chip industry, blasted the Biden Administration in a statement, arguing that the restrictions would hand market share to China. “By attempting to rig market outcomes and stifle competition — the lifeblood of innovation — the Biden Administration’s new rule threatens to squander America’s hard-won technological advantage,” said the statement, authored by Nvidia’s president of government affairs Ned Finkle. The company also flattered Trump in the same statement, crediting him with “laying the foundation for America’s current strength and success in AI.”

Allen agrees that they might push buyers toward China. But not fast enough, he says. It takes five to 10 years for a chipmaker to turn even huge investments into machines capable of making advanced new chips, and China simply doesn’t have that time, assuming AGI is on the horizon. “They are really stuck because they cannot get the advanced equipment that they need,” Allen says. “The alternative to American AI chips isn’t Chinese AI chips. It’s no AI chips.”

Correction appended, Jan. 14: The original version of this story misstated the previous state-of-the-art score on a reasoning test before OpenAI’s o3 set a new record in December. It was 32%, not 5%.

Lawyers representing the class action said that Apple excluded potential rivals from competing for customers on devices running its iOS operating system by forcing developers to sell their apps exclusively through its own App Store and charging commissions of 30% for purchases.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is proposing a new framework for the exporting of the advanced computer chips used to develop artificial intelligence, an attempt to balance national security concerns about the technology with the economic interests of producers and other countries.

But the framework proposed Monday also raised concerns of chip industry executives who say the rules would limit access to existing chips used for video games and restrict in 120 countries the chips used for data centers and AI products. Mexico, Portugal, Israel and Switzerland are among the nations that could have limited access.

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Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on a call with reporters previewing the framework that it’s “critical” to preserve America’s leadership in AI and the development of AI-related computer chips. The fast-evolving AI technology enables computers to produce novels, make scientific research breakthroughs, automate driving and foster a range of other transformations that could reshape economies and warfare.

“As AI becomes more powerful, the risks to our national security become even more intense,” Raimondo said. The framework “is designed to safeguard the most advanced AI technology and ensure that it stays out of the hands of our foreign adversaries but also enabling the broad diffusion and sharing of the benefits with partner countries.”

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan stressed that the framework would ensure that the most cutting-edge aspects of AI would be developed within the United States and with its closest allies, instead of possibly getting offshored such as the battery and renewable energy sectors.

A tech industry group, the Information Technology Industry Council, warned Raimondo in a letter last week that a hastily implemented new rule from the Democratic administration could fragment global supply chains and put U.S. companies at a disadvantage.

“While we share the U.S. government’s commitment to national and economic security, the rule’s potential risks to U.S. global leadership in AI cannot be emphasized enough,” said a statement from Naomi Wilson, the group’s senior vice president for Asia and global trade policy. She called for a more extensive consultation with the tech industry.

One industry executive, who is familiar with the framework and insisted on anonymity to discuss it, said the proposed restrictions would limit access to chips already used for video games, despite claims made otherwise by the government. The executive said it would also limit which companies could build data centers abroad.

Because the framework includes a 120-day comment period, the incoming Republican administration of President-elect Donald Trump could ultimately determine the rules for the sales abroad of advanced computer chips. This sets up a scenario in which Trump will have to balance economic interests with the need to keep the United States and its allies safe.

Government officials said they felt the need to act quickly in hopes of preserving what is perceived to be America’s six- to 18-month advantage on AI over rivals such as China, a head start that could easily erode if competitors were able to stockpile the chips and make further gains.

Ned Finkle, vice president of external affairs at Nvidia, said in a statement that the prior Trump administration had helped create the foundation for AI’s development and that the proposed framework would hurt innovation without achieving the stated national security goals.

“While cloaked in the guise of an ‘anti-China’ measure, these rules would do nothing to enhance U.S. security,” he said. “The new rules would control technology worldwide, including technology that is already widely available in mainstream gaming PCs and consumer hardware.”

Under the framework, roughly 20 key allies and partners would face no restrictions on accessing chips, but other countries would face caps on the chips they could import, according to a fact sheet provided by the White House.

The allies without restrictions include Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan and the United Kingdom.

Users outside of these close allies could purchase up to 50,000 graphics processing units per country. There would also be government-to-government deals which could bump up the cap to 100,000 if their renewable energy and technological security goals are aligned with the United States.

Institutions in certain countries could also apply for a legal status that would let them purchase up to 320,000 advanced graphics processing units over two years. Still, there would be limits as to how much AI computational capacity could be placed abroad by companies and other institutions.

Also, computer chip orders equivalent to 1,700 advanced graphics processing units would not need a license to import or count against the national chip cap, among the other standards set by the framework. The exception for the 1,700 graphics processing units would likely help to meet the orders for universities and medical institutions, as opposed to data centers.

The U.S. is imposing some of its strongest measures yet to limit Chinese advances in AI, aiming to block backdoors in other countries that Beijing could use to access technology.

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The fate of TikTok in the United States will soon be in the hands of the Supreme Court, as the Justices hear oral arguments Friday over a law that could shut down the popular social media platform.

At issue is the constitutionality of legislation passed by Congress and signed into federal law in April 2024 that could force TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell the app to a U.S. company or face an outright ban in the country. The law sets a Jan. 19 deadline for TikTok’s sale, citing national security concerns about the app’s foreign ownership and potential influence over American users.

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With over 170 million users in the U.S., TikTok has become a cultural juggernaut, influencing everything from political discourse to entertainment trends. But the government argues that the app, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, poses a national security risk, particularly over the potential for Chinese influence on the platform’s algorithms and access to sensitive data. 

The Supreme Court agreed to expedite the case, though it’s unclear how soon a decision might come. Legal experts say the case is complicated because it pits the government’s national security concerns against the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans who use TikTok to express themselves, share information, and engage in political discourse. “If the Court upholds the law, it will almost certainly do so on relatively narrow grounds,” says Alan Rozenshtein, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. “It might not tell us a lot about social media regulation generally.”

The Biden Administration, defending the law, argues that the government has the constitutional authority to regulate foreign-owned entities that may pose a threat to national security. The Administration asserts that TikTok’s Chinese ownership provides a potential gateway for the Chinese government to access vast amounts of data on American citizens, possibly leveraging the platform for covert influence operations. In its Supreme Court brief, the Justice Department contends that the law does not restrict speech but addresses the specific issue of foreign control over a vital communication platform.

By contrast, TikTok’s legal team and a coalition of app users argue that the law violates the First Amendment, which protects free speech. They assert that TikTok’s algorithms and editorial choices are inherently expressive, shaping the content that millions of Americans consume every day. TikTok, in its brief, emphasized that the government hasn’t furnished concrete evidence that ByteDance has manipulated content or censored users at the direction of the Chinese government. The company argues that simply requiring disclosure of foreign ownership would be a far less restrictive way of addressing national security concerns, without resorting to a full ban.

The case presents novel questions about the intersection of national security, foreign influence, and free speech in the digital age. “Rarely, if ever, has the Court confronted a free-speech case that matters to so many people,” a brief filed on behalf of TikTok creators reads. 

The legal battle over TikTok has attracted unusual attention due to its political and cultural significance. Congress passed the law that would force a sale in April with bipartisan support as lawmakers from both parties have been uneasy over the app’s ties to China. But TikTok has fought the law at every turn, arguing that the U.S. government is overstepping its bounds by attempting to regulate foreign ownership of a private company.

In December, a federal appeals court upheld the law, ruling that the government has a national security interest in regulating TikTok in the U.S. 

The case also finds itself intertwined with the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump, who takes office just one day after the law is set to go into effect. Trump, who has offered inconsistent views on TikTok in the past, has recently expressed an interest in saving the platform. In late December, Trump filed an unusual amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to delay its decision until after his inauguration, suggesting he could broker a resolution between TikTok and Congress once in office. The brief, submitted by John Sauer, the lawyer Trump has nominated for solicitor general, refers to Trump as “one of the most powerful, prolific, and influential users of social media in history.”

“This unfortunate timing,” his brief said, “interferes with President Trump’s ability to manage the United States’ foreign policy and to pursue a resolution to both protect national security and save a social-media platform that provides a popular vehicle for 170 million Americans to exercise their core First Amendment rights.”

Trump met with TikTok CEO Shou Chew at Mar-a-Lago last month. Hours before that meeting, Trump said he has a “warm spot in my heart for TikTok” because he made gains with young voters in the presidential election. “And there are those that say that TikTok has something to do with it.”

While Trump’s brief has garnered attention, the Court’s focus will likely remain on the core constitutional issues at stake, says Rozenshtein. “Supreme Court Justices throughout history do not want to antagonize the President unnecessarily,” he says, “but at the same time, what Trump is asking for is lawless…There’s no basis in law for the court to delay a duly enacted law for some indeterminate amount of time so as to give the President the ability to do something unspecified.”

While it’s difficult to predict how the Court will rule, its involvement signals that the Justices may have reservations about the law’s impact on free speech. Last year, the Court signaled social media platforms have the same First Amendment rights as newspapers and other publishers, and TikTok’s defenders argue that the app’s role in free speech is similar to traditional media outlets.

Should ByteDance be forced to sell TikTok to an American company, a number of potential options could quickly emerge. Project Liberty, founded by billionaire Frank McCourt, announced on Thursday that it has made a formal offer to ByteDance to acquire TikTok’s U.S. assets bankrolled by a consortium of investors interested in pursuing a “peoples bid” for TikTok, including billionaire and Shark Tank host Kevin O’Leary. A sale could be worth $20 billion to $100 billion, depending on how the U.S. part of TikTok is split from its parent company. (TikTok employs roughly 7,000 people in the U.S.)

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