AI firm Manus to resume 'independent' operations after China blocks Meta deal

AI startup Manus said Tuesday it would resume "operating as an independent company," months after Beijing blocked Meta's multi-billion-dollar acquisition of the Chinese-developed, Singapore-based company.

Some data going back to late December will be deleted as a result, and Manus urged users impacted by the change to back up their data.

"This is part of our separation from Meta; we must take this step to comply with regulatory requirements in specific parts of the world," Manus said in a blog post.

Meta agreed to acquire Manus, an artificial intelligence (AI) agent developed by the startup Butterfly Effect, in a deal reportedly worth around $2 billion.

AI agents are software programs that are designed to perform tasks without human intervention.

Meta pursued a deal with Manus to "bring a leading agent to billions of people and unlock opportunities for businesses across our products, the social media giant said in December when it announced the deal.

However, China's top economic planning body blocked the deal in April and ordered them to "withdraw the acquisition."

At the same time, Beijing also reportedly restricted travel for two of Manus' co-founders, preventing them from leaving China.

Meta previously told AFP in a statement that "the transaction complied fully with applicable law".

China has been cracking down on a practice known as "Singapore-washing," which is when companies leave the country to take advantage of looser regulations, global customers or funding opportunities.

Beijing "tolerated" it for a while, but "the Manus case marks a major turning point" as the US-China AI race heats up, Wendy Chang at the Mercator Institute for China Studies told AFP in April.

The crackdown is a signal "to its own tech leaders, more than to anybody else, that attempts to bypass national regulation will not be tolerated," Chang continued.

Many of Manus' former investors are in discussions to retake stakes in the startup at a $2 billion valuation, including Tencent which would become its largest shareholder, the FT reported.

In the United States, the unwinding of the Manus deal may be a temporary setback for Meta, which is racing to strengthen its position in AI.

In a long essay published Monday about the future of artificial intelligence, Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg called for the United States to compete against China, prevent "government tyranny" over AI and ensure that "superintelligence" technology will become available to everyone.

Superintelligence is a theoretical point when AI's capabilities exceed human intelligence.

On Monday, Meta also announced a new model called Glimmer, which it developed in part from Muse Spark, a closed-source model it announced in April and updated last week.

Glimmer is an open weight model, meaning users can download and modify the underlying rules that govern the AI system.

"Rather than centralizing superintelligence, we should distribute it widely and give every person the ability to direct it," Zuckerberg wrote, arguing that open models are a key part of a global AI ecosystem.

Competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic largely focus on closed AI models, which are considered black boxes that users cannot inspect themselves.

Leading AI developers have met with the Trump administration in recent months, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Nvidia, Microsoft and Meta, according to reports.

In June, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that called for major AI developers to submit new models to the government for review 30 days before they are publicly released. It also gave the federal government a 60-day deadline to finalize a proposed framework.

Open models will reportedly be exempt from the new voluntary review process.

That deadline passed on August 1 without any public announcement.