The Chinese government has ordered Meta to reverse its acquisition of Manas, an AI startup building autonomous agents.
Meta announced the acquisition of Manus in December as part of its push to build general-purpose AI agents across its products.
China’s National Development and Reform Commission announced on Monday that it had banned Meta from investing in Manus. The committee in charge of economic policymaking ordered the companies to cancel the acquisitions. No further details were provided.
“The transaction fully complied with applicable law. We look forward to an appropriate resolution to the investigation,” a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider.
Manas was founded in China but moved to Singapore in mid-2025. The company made headlines last year when it previewed an AI agent that can autonomously perform tasks such as stock market analysis. In December, a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider that Manas would have no ties to China after the acquisition.
It was not immediately clear how the companies’ unwinding would work. Some efforts between the two companies are ongoing. Manas recently announced an integration with Meta’s ad management tool, which Manas described as “bringing professional AI advertising analysts directly within the Manas workspace.”
Meta Agent’s Ambition
There is a lot at stake for Meta if the contract with Manus is terminated.
Meta’s latest AI model, Muse Spark, was popular upon release, and the company has a huge opportunity to incorporate AI into its most popular applications, such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
Meta needs to seize this opportunity as the AI industry is rapidly shifting its focus to AI agents, and their capabilities improve as the underlying models improve.
Manas gained a lot of attention last year when it demonstrated an AI agent that appeared to be competent at tasks like planning vacations and screening job applicants.
Even better for Meta, Manus works with models from other companies, including Anthropic’s Claude. This means that through Manus, Meta can effectively get a working agent platform out of the box without the pressure of building the underlying model. It also gives you the option to swap to other Frontier models in the future if needed.
This has potentially big implications for Meta, not only in the products it’s building for customers, but also in how it transforms its business to become “AI native” by making smaller teams more reliant on AI agents to perform coding and other tasks.
Manus could also be a great revenue driver for Meta, as it has an established and popular product. Manas announced in December that its annual recurring revenue exceeds $100 million and it has “millions” of users.
“This acquisition provides Meta with a functioning business with paying customers, meaningful revenue and an infrastructure already proven at scale,” Marcy Grundy, company profile analyst at research firm GlobalData, said in a December note.
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