In a bid to address national security concerns and avoid a potential ban in the United States, ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, is creating a U.S.-based clone of its recommendation algorithm that functions independently of the Chinese version, according to a report by Reuters.

The move comes as President Biden signed a bill on April 24 that would ban the popular short-form video platform if ByteDance fails to sell it within a year. TikTok is currently fighting the ban and has sued the U.S. government over the law earlier this month.

Reuters reports that the process of separating millions of lines of code began last year, before the legal battle, with hundreds of ByteDance and TikTok engineers working to create an identical algorithm separate from anything related to the Chinese version of the app.

Despite the ongoing efforts to keep TikTok operational in the U.S., the company maintains that it has no plans to sell any assets and that separating its U.S. assets would be impossible. In an X statement, TikTok said, “As we said in our court filing, the ‘qualified divestiture’ demanded by the Act to allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States is simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally. And certainly not on the 270-day timeline required by the Act.”