The controversial law that could ban TikTok nationwide come January has also thrust other apps from its parent company ByteDance onto the chopping block—including one that’s just as popular in the United States but gets a fraction of the scrutiny: AI video editing app CapCut.
The Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, signed by President Joe Biden in April, would ban apps operated by ByteDance, TikTok and other entities owned or “controlled by a foreign adversary” unless they divest their U.S. business to an American owner in nine months. The goal, according to the White House and Congress, is to resolve national security concerns that TikTok could be used to surveil Americans, access their sensitive data, influence what they see or manipulate what they talk about. But the law extends well beyond ByteDance’s best-known app to several others from the China-based tech giant that could also be banned, signaling that lawmakers also fear those apps’ data and surveillance practices.
CapCut is the biggest such app, a platform similar to Apple’s iMovie that people use to edit videos or make memes on their phones before posting them online or sending them to friends; it also caters to corporate clients with CapCut for Business. After TikTok, CapCut is arguably ByteDance’s most popular app in the U.S. and around the world: Last year, it was used by half a billion people globally. And in the U.S., while TikTok was downloaded 45 million times, CapCut was downloaded a close 44.7 million, according to app analytics firm Data.ai. (It helps that CapCut is promoted all over TikTok, which itself has more than 1 billion users, and that you also don’t need to have TikTok to use it.)
TikTok was downloaded 45 million times in the U.S. last year. CapCut was downloaded a close 44.7 million.
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CapCut has become core to American internet culture, responsible for some of today’s most viral moments on and off TikTok. Though it’s free, Americans spent an estimated $24.6 million buying subscriptions and special editing features in the app last year, making the U.S. its top-spending market after China, according to Data.ai. Last fall, it became just the second ByteDance app to pass $100 million in global consumer spending. CapCut has steadily climbed the ranks of Apple and Google’s U.S. app stores since it was introduced here in 2020, becoming the third most-downloaded app that was not a game in 2023, according to Data.ai. It trailed only the shopping app Temu (ranked first) and TikTok (second), both of which are also owned by Chinese companies.
But you wouldn’t know CapCut is as widely used as TikTok based on the rhetoric coming out of Washington, where China hawks have for the better part of four years focused squarely on ByteDance’s crown jewel. Because it’s a video editor, CapCut doesn’t present the same overt content issues as TikTok. Still, some have argued that the troves of valuable personal data CapCut collects—and its oversight by ByteDance leaders in China—make it every bit as worrisome, especially since the company hasn’t tried to cordon off American data on CapCut in the way it has for TikTok (under a plan known as Project Texas).
“TikTok has promised to spend some huge amount of money… to wall off all their information from China, and they have a separate U.S. entity that they say runs TikTok in the United States… but there’s nothing like that for CapCut. There's no U.S. entity; it's just run directly by ByteDance in China,” said Jeannie Evans, a partner at law firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, which is representing CapCut users in a class action lawsuit alleging the platform has illegally stolen and profited off sensitive details such as what users look like and where, precisely, they’re located.
The suit argues that ByteDance has violated federal and state consumer protection and privacy laws. Biometric, geolocation, messaging and other data collected by CapCut goes far beyond what’s needed to run the app and is not clearly disclosed, Evans said, raising questions about what’s being done with it and by whom.
“Your email address, your phone number—you can change all that... [but] you can't change your face or your eyes or your voice,” she said. “We know, as with TikTok, that Chinese law requires Chinese companies to make all their data available to the Chinese government… that's not disclosed in the privacy policy.” Hagens Berman filed an updated complaint in February (originally, last summer in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois), and ByteDance has filed a motion to dismiss. ByteDance and TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.
The ownership and leadership questions that have plagued TikTok—such as the extent to which its operations roll up to top brass in China—also extend to CapCut. While TikTok CEO Shou Chew lives in Singapore, CapCut is run by ByteDance personnel in China, according to a report in The Information. Among them is Kelly Zhang Nan, who until recently was CEO of Douyin, TikTok’s sister app in China, and is now at the helm of CapCut and its Chinese counterpart Jianying.
Despite this, CapCut has largely escaped attention in Washington. In 2023, Senate Commerce’s then-consumer protection co-leaders, Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn, briefly asked about it in a letter to TikTok’s CEO shared exclusively with Forbes, while House Energy and Commerce’s top Republican, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, namechecked it in passing at a recent hearing on the ban legislation. But most lawmakers haven’t mentioned the tool as they’ve spoken publicly about their concerns with TikTok, even though it’s still looped in with the government’s divestiture bill.
CapCut’s prevalence has now become part of ByteDance’s arguments, in its own suit against the U.S. government, for why the new law is unconstitutional: The law would take down all ByteDance apps available in the U.S., not just the one in question, and lawmakers have failed to show how the others raise the national security concerns they claim exist with TikTok.
The law is “over-inclusive because it applies to other ByteDance Ltd.-owned applications that Congress has not shown—and could not possibly prove—pose the risks the Act apparently seeks to address,” TikTok and ByteDance said in their complaint.
“The government has never contended that all—or even most—of the content on TikTok (or any other ByteDance-owned application) represents disinformation, misinformation, or propaganda,” the complaint said. “Yet the Act shuts down all speech on ByteDance-owned applications at all times, in all places, and in all manners. That is textbook overbreadth.”
Got a tip about CapCut, ByteDance, TikTok or social media more broadly? Reach out securely to Alexandra S. Levine on Signal/WhatsApp at (310) 526–1242 or email at alevine@forbes.com.
Rex Booth, a former director in the White House’s cyber office, said that while there’s some risk the Chinese government could get information about CapCut users making content it doesn’t agree with, they pale relative to qualms raised about TikTok—and even those don’t rise to the level of blocking the app.
Because TikTok (unlike CapCut) is at its core a social media platform, the insights it can provide on both individuals and entire networks of people could theoretically be more useful for gathering intel, Booth said. Without those webs of social connections being a key component of CapCut, “the value for an intelligence agency to spy via CapCut, I think, is greatly reduced,” he told Forbes. “If the problem that we're trying to solve is the potential for the illicit extraction of intelligence through these apps, then the risk is much higher with TikTok.”
But he said the government’s arguments in favor of banning TikTok have been “relatively weakly defended,” warning that a nationwide shutdown of all ByteDance apps would lead to “unforeseen consequences”—like blowback from other adversaries and allies that may see the action as not so different from China’s own move to block American apps (which the U.S. has criticized as a dangerous form of censorship).
“There is the risk of encouraging other governments, other entities, to take similar measures against what they see as our digital dominance” in the future, said Booth, who was also former chief of threat analysis at the government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. “There's a decent chance that not only will the Chinas of the world look at us, number one, through a lens of hypocrisy, but two, also with the potential to take action against us… [and] broader nations throughout the globe, including our allies, will probably do the same.”
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