Meta said it is acquiring Singapore-based AI startup Manus as part of a push to expand general-purpose AI agents across its products.
“Meta’s acquisition of Manus AI will enable us to provide the most advanced technology to our users with safeguards in place to eliminate areas of potential risk,” a spokesperson for Meta told Business Insider in a statement. “There will be no continuing Chinese ownership interests in Manus AI following the transaction, and Manus AI will discontinue its services and operations in China.”
Manus was founded in China but relocated to Singapore in mid-2025.
The social media giant’s acquisition is another step in its AI ambitions: This time, focusing on AI agents.
Meta said Manus has built an autonomous agent that can independently handle complex tasks such as market research, coding, and data analysis, and the technology will be integrated across consumer and business products, including Meta AI.
The deal would not disrupt its customers, Manus said. It will continue selling subscriptions through its app and website and will keep operating from Singapore.
Manus launched its first general AI agent in March 2025 and, in a press release about the deal, said it has processed more than 147 trillion tokens and “powered more than 80 million virtual computers.”
The company’s background has drawn political scrutiny. In May, Sen. John Cornyn criticized US investment in Manus, in a post on X, questioning whether American capital should support AI companies with roots in China amid concerns about economic and military competition with Beijing. His comment followed reports that a US venture capital firm, Benchmark, joined a $75 million funding round for Manus earlier this year.
Meta does not operate in China and said the acquisition will fully sever Manus’s remaining ties to the country, including Chinese ownership interests. As part of the deal, Meta will wind down Manus’s limited business operations in China, including shutting down the AI assistant, Monica.cn, business and relocating relevant employees.
The spokesperson added that Manus employees joining Meta will not have access to data collected directly from customers, and that Meta will continue to geo-gate access to its AI models.
Manus has positioned itself as an execution layer for AI, focused on turning advanced models into systems that can carry out real-world work.
The AI startup drew widespread attention after saying it had built a fully autonomous AI agent capable of executing tasks end-to-end with minimal human input. Early-stage testing by Effie Webb for Business Insider in March 2025 highlighted both the product’s ambition and its shortcomings, including hallucinated data and execution errors in complex tasks.
“Through continuous product iteration, we’ve been working hard to make these capabilities more reliable and useful across a growing range of real-world use cases,” Manus said in a statement about the deal.
Meta said bringing the Manus team on board will help it deliver general-purpose AI agents to billions of people and millions of businesses using its products.
Meta’s move comes as the company ramps up its AI ambitions through aggressive hiring and dealmaking. Earlier this year, Meta acquired a 49% stake in data company Scale AI, a deal widely viewed as an effort to bring CEO Alexandr Wang into the fold to work on the company’s superintelligence efforts.
This story was written using Business Insider’s AI tools and edited by a Business Insider editor.
