China’s decision not to allow Meta to acquire local AI outfit Manus AI has become reality, with the upstart advising users it will soon “return to operating as an independent company.”

Manus burst onto the AI scene in March 2025 with a “general agent” that allowed users assign tasks to an AI. To illustrate its powers, Manus claimed it could select the best candidate for a job by evaluating job applications stored in a .ZIP file, which it would open and read, then assess against user-defined criteria, before writing a document that ranked the best applications. All that work happened inside a virtual PC that Manus’s agents drove without human help to do the job.

The service quickly gathered many enthusiastic users and claimed to have hit a $100 million run rate. AI companies always need stacks of cash to buy and run more GPUs. To find it, Manus moved its official headquarters from China to investor-friendly Singapore.

In December 2025, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to acquire Manus and said he planned to use its tech across The Social Network’s AI products.

“Manus's exceptional talent will join Meta's team to deliver general-purpose agents across our consumer and business products, including in Meta AI,” according to Meta’s acquisition announcement.

Beijing had other ideas and in early 2026 launched an investigation into the acquisition. By April, Chinese regulators had decided to forbid foreign investment in Manus.

Meta decided not to fight China over the matter and started disentangling itself from Manus.

That effort seems near complete because on Tuesday Manus published a note to its users that opens “Manus will soon return to operating as an independent company.”

The separation from Meta won’t be painless because Manus says legal matters mean it must delete some user data generated since December 29, 2025. The company will type rm -rf on August 24. Customers who download their data before then can restore it to Manus from August 25.

Meta hasn’t said how or if it will replace Manus’s tech, or if it learned enough during its brief time working with the Chinese company to get what it needed to build the superintelligence Zuck this week promised to bring us all.

The whole incident now serves as an example of China’s determination to keep control of local innovators, rather than let them leave the country in search of foreign investment. Yet at the same time, China is using open-weight models to challenge American model-makers. ®