What's at stake for Meta if China kills its Manus deal
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- China has ordered Meta to unwind its acquisition of the startup Manus.
- Meta announced it would be acquiring Manus in December for $2 billion.
- Manus was created in China but moved to Singapore mid-last year.
The Chinese government has ordered Meta to unwind its acquisition of Manus, an AI startup that builds autonomous agents.
Meta announced it would acquire Manus in December as part of a push into building general-purpose AI agents across its products.
China's National Development and Reform Commission said on Monday that it had prohibited Meta's investment in Manus. The commission, which handles economic policymaking, ordered the companies to unwind the acquisition. It did not provide any further details.
"The transaction complied fully with applicable law. We anticipate an appropriate resolution to the inquiry," a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider.
Manus was created in China but relocated to Singapore in mid-2025. The company went viral last year after it previewed an AI agent that could autonomously perform tasks such as stock analysis. In December, a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider that Manus would have no ties to China following the acquisition.
Meta's agent ambitions
There's much at stake for Meta if the Manus deal is unwound.
While Meta's latest AI model, Muse Spark, proved popular on release, the company has a bigger opportunity to embed AI into its most popular applications, such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
Meta needs to capture this opportunity as the AI industry is quickly shifting its focus to AI agents, which are becoming more capable as the underlying models get better.
Manus garnered much attention last year when it demoed an AI agent that appeared to competently perform tasks such as planning vacations and screening job candidates.
Better yet for Meta, Manus runs on other companies' models, including Anthropic's Claude. That means that through Manus, Meta effectively gets a working agent platform out of the box, without the pressure to build the underlying model — and with the option to swap in other frontier models down the road if it wishes.
That's potentially big for Meta, not only for the products it's building for customers, but for how it's transforming its business to be "AI-native" by having smaller teams that rely more on AI agents to code and perform other tasks.
Manus would also be a nice revenue booster for Meta with an established and popular product. Manus said in December that it had crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue and that its users were in the "millions."
"The purchase gives Meta a functioning business with paying customers, meaningful revenue and infrastructure already proven at scale," said Murthy Grandhi, company profiles analyst at research firm GlobalData, in a December note.
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