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ByteDance reportedly plans to release US-specific version of CapCut

ByteDance reportedly plans to release US-specific version of CapCut

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The AI Colony
July 09, 2025

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ByteDance reportedly plans to release US-specific version of CapCut

ByteDance is getting ready to fence off part of its creative empire. The company plans to migrate all U.S. users of CapCut, its wildly popular video-editing app, onto a standalone “CapCut US” build.

ByteDance has been under pressure since a 2024 U.S. law ordered it to divest the American versions of TikTok and any sister apps or risk a nationwide ban. Spinning up U.S.-only editions of both TikTok and CapCut looks like a bid to satisfy those rules while ByteDance explores a potential sale of its U.S. assets. CapCut is a heavyweight in its own right. The app has logged more than one billion downloads on Google Play and currently sits at the top of Apple’s U.S. App Store in the photo-and-video category, ahead of Instagram and YouTube. For creators, it’s the go-to toolkit for viral templates and quick edits, and a critical part of the TikTok ecosystem that fuels short-form video culture.

What we still don’t know is if U.S.-only CapCut will keep global templates and effects, whether its recommendation engine will have access to ByteDance’s original algorithms, and whether users will actually download a second copy of an app they already have.