China cancelled the acquisition by Meta, and the AI company Manus returns to operate independently
AI developer Manus will return to independent operations after the Chinese regulator ordered Meta to cancel its approximately $2 billion acquisition deal.
Manus, the artificial intelligence company acquired last December by Meta in a deal worth about $2 billion, announced that it will soon return to operating as an independent company. The announcement comes following a demand by the Chinese regulator, which ordered Meta to cancel the acquisition.
Manus, which developed general-purpose artificial intelligence agents, was founded in China in 2022 and later moved its headquarters to Singapore. The acquisition deal, which was announced in December 2025, attracted immediate attention from both Beijing and Washington, as Chinese authorities examined whether the deal violated the country's laws regarding foreign investments. China's National Development and Reform Commission published its official decision in April, in which it ordered the parties to cancel the deal.
The decision led to a complex separation process, against the backdrop of intensified Chinese oversight of cross-border technology deals, in parallel with the growing competition between the USA and China for talent, hardware, and data in the artificial intelligence arena.
In its announcement today (Tuesday), Manus noted that some of its users will be required to back up data created in the service starting from December 29, 2025 — the date on which the Meta deal was announced.
"This is part of our separation from Meta, we must take this step to comply with regulatory requirements in certain regions of the world," the company's statement read.
Meta planned to integrate Manus's technology into its consumer and business products, as part of an aggressive wave of expansion in the field of artificial intelligence. In recent months, the company has been working to build a subscription-based business model around the technology, in an attempt to compete with Google and the leading laboratories in the field, Anthropic and OpenAI. Last week, Meta launched its first code agent, in another attempt to generate revenue from its artificial intelligence activities.
