The Amazon logo on the exterior of a brick building, San Francisco, California, August 20, 2024.
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Amazon CNBC confirmed that representatives met with a Chinese House of Representatives committee in recent months to discuss lawmakers' concerns about the company's partnership with TikTok.
A spokesperson for the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party confirmed the meeting, which centered around a shopping deal between Amazon and TikTok announced in August. The agreement allows users of TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, to link their accounts with Amazon and make purchases from the site without leaving TikTok.
“The select committee told Amazon that it would be dangerous and unwise for Amazon to cooperate with TikTok given the serious threat to national security posed by the app,” the spokesperson said. The two parties met in September, according to Bloomberg, which was the first to report the news.
Representatives for Amazon and TikTok did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.
TikTok's future viability in the US is uncertain. In April, President Joe Biden signed a law requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok by January 19. If TikTok fails to cut ties with its parent company, app stores and internet hosting services will be blocked from offering the app.
President-elect Donald Trump could save TikTok from a potential US ban. He promised during his election campaign that he would “save” TikTok, and said in a March interview with CNBC's “Squawk Box” that “there's a lot of good things and there's a lot of bad things” about the app.
In his first administration, Trump tried to implement a TikTok ban. He had a change of heart around the time he met billionaire Jeff Yass. The major Republican donor's business, Susquehanna International Group, owns a 15% stake in ByteDance, while Yass owns a 7% stake in the company, NBC and CNBC reported in March.
— CNBC's Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
