The Commission on Foreign Investment in the US opened an investigation with Chinese-owned video application TikTok following a suspected national security threat.

An intergovernmental panel could be considering whether the music video making app will send data to China, the New York Times said on Nov. 1, citing unnamed sources. The investigation is led by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews acquisitions in the country.

Last week, US senators called on US intelligence to consider the security risks coming from "TikTok and other content platforms based in China operating in the US". TikTok, a social network owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has about 500 million users worldwide, of which 110 million are in the US.

The US may reconsider Beijing-based company ByteDance acquiring Musical.ly and merging with TikTok in 2017. The US Treasury Department said it could not confirm the evaluation of foreign investment for TikTok. "By law, information submitted to CFIUS may not be disclosed to the public," a US Treasury spokesman said.

Sen. Marco Rubio welcomed the news of the investigation. "Last month I asked the Ministry of Finance to conduct a CFIUS assessment of TikTok. Any platform owned by a company in China that collects huge amounts of data on Americans is a serious threat. potential with our country, "Rubio wrote on Twitter.

Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and Republican senator Tom Cotton warned TikTok as a potential counterintelligence threat. Senators suspect TikTok could be used to influence the 2020 US presidential election "in the same way that Russians followed social media in 2016".

A representative of TikTok said he could not comment on any legal issues but said "there is no higher priority than winning the trust of users and regulatory agencies in the US".