By Georgia Wells and Cara Lombardo

Plans to quickly finalize a deal between the Chinese parent company of TikTok and suitors for the app's U.S. operations have been thrown off track as the parties huddled this weekend to weigh new Chinese restrictions that appear designed to affect a potential sale, according to people familiar with the discussions.

China late on Friday issued new restrictions on the export of artificial-intelligence technology that forced ByteDance Ltd., TikTok's parent, to slow down talks with companies including Microsoft Corp., Walmart Inc. and Oracle Corp. for a portion of the social media app, according to people familiar with the matter.

ByteDance, which had received the broad outlines of bids on Friday for the TikTok assets, had been expected to enter into exclusive discussions with one group of suitors over the weekend, the people said. The Trump administration in early August set a mid-September deadline for ByteDance to sell its American operation.

Microsoft and Walmart have been working together, and Oracle has also been joined by ByteDance investors General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital and Coatue Management LLC.

"We are studying the new regulations that were released Friday," ByteDance General Counsel Erich Andersen said. "As with any cross-border transaction, we will follow the applicable laws, which in this case include those of the US and China."

The talks are far from being scuttled, but the latest developments do make clear that China plans to keep as close a watch on any potential deal as the Trump administration. President Trump and other U.S. officials have raised the specter of privacy and national security concerns over TikTok's data collection in demanding that its U.S. operations be sold or that it face a ban. TikTok has said it hasn't and won't share data on U.S. users with the Chinese government.

--Miriam Gottfried, Eva Xiao and Liza Lin contributed to this article.