Editing App CapCut Might Get Swallowed up in America's Plan to Ban TikTok

The impending federal TikTok ban has filled many of the platform's most regular users with some amount of dread. The ban is set to go into effect on Jan. 19, and it seems like the Supreme Court is unlikely to intervene on behalf of the company.

Following the news that TikTok could really disappear, many wanted to know whether CapCut, a video editing software that many use to edit their videos for TikTok, could disappear too. Here's what we know.

The reason some people are concerned that CapCut could get banned alongside TikTok is that CapCut is owned by ByteDance, the parent company that also owns TikTok. CapCut is one of the best places to go for editing videos for TikTok, in part because it has hundreds of ready-made templates that align with the trends on the platform. The app became hugely popular after it first launched outside of China in 2020 and now has 200 million users worldwide.

The Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which was signed into law in April of 2024 by President Biden, targeted ByteDance and all of its subsidiaries over concerns that TikTok and its other apps could be used by the Chinese government.

Although the primary target of the act was TikTok and its massive user base, all of ByteDance's U.S.-based apps would get banned under the law.

Those apps include CapCut as well as Lemon8 and Hypic. The CapCut ban will work the same way that the TikTok ban does. The app won't immediately disappear from your phone, but it will no longer be available in the app store and it will eventually become broken because it can no longer update itself. This will happen over time as the app gets slower and continues to develop more bugs, which will make it a worse user experience.

If CapCut really is on its way to being removed from U.S. app stores, then the only sure solution is for it to be sold to a company based in the U.S. It's possible, too, that the incoming Trump administration could intervene to keep the act from being enforced, but any hopes that the U.S. Supreme Court would side with TikTok and against the federal government were dimmed during oral arguments, where the court seemed skeptical of TikTok's case.

Given that there haven't been any obvious buyers for either CapCut or TikTok, it really does seem like both apps could be on their way to getting banned. That could leave plenty of people frustrated or even looking for other ways to make a living.

Regardless of its impact on users, though, the government clearly believes there are good reasons to keep the Chinese company out of the American marketplace. Since it first launched in America, TikTok has become one of the most dominant social media platforms in the country.