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AI Daily Brief — 18 January 2025

Saturday went dark — literally. At roughly 10:30 PM ET, TikTok voluntarily blacked out service for about 170 million US users, hours before the divest-or-ban law was set to take effect after the Supreme Court’s Friday ruling. Service was restored about fourteen hours later once President-elect Trump signaled an executive-order extension. The most consequential AI-adjacent signal was the migration: RedNote/Xiaohongshu held the #1 spot on the US App Store, with second-week-of-January US downloads running roughly 30x year-over-year and 20x week-over-week as TikTok refugees flooded another Chinese-owned platform.

Top stories

  • TikTok goes dark in the US. Around 10:30 PM ET, TikTok pulled service for US users with an in-app notice citing the federal divest-or-ban law. CapCut and Lemon8 (other ByteDance apps) also disabled. Service began restoring around 14 hours later after Trump publicly committed to a 75-day extension, formalized by executive order on Jan 20. via NPR · via Washington Post
  • RedNote (Xiaohongshu) sustains #1 US App Store position. The Chinese-owned social platform — 300M existing users globally — added roughly 3 million new US users in the second week of January, with downloads running 30x YoY and 20x WoW. A data-sovereignty plot twist: US users fleeing one Chinese-owned app voluntarily moved to another. via Rest of World

Who shipped

Nothing. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, and xAI stayed silent through the TikTok blackout and inauguration eve.

Open-source pulse

No new releases. DeepSeek‘s R1 was forty-eight hours away. Chinese labs continued running silent ahead of the late-January cluster.

Quiet corners

arXiv announcement system paused for the weekend. Frontier-lab newswires dark. The TikTok-RedNote sequence was the day’s most operationally interesting AI-adjacent signal: a real-time stress test of US data-sovereignty policy that played out on the consumer App Store rather than in front of a regulator.

By the numbers

  • ~170M — US TikTok users hit by the blackout
  • ~14h — blackout duration before restoration
  • ~3M — new US RedNote users added the week prior
  • 30x / 20x — RedNote US download growth YoY / WoW
  • Most-mentioned company: TikTok / ByteDance

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 18 January 2025.