Labs

Manus splits from
Meta as Beijing
forces $2 billion
unwind

China's NDRC-ordered reversal of Meta's December acquisition sends the AI agent startup back to independence, with Tencent circling a controlling stake and user data slated for deletion this month.

By Astrid Bjornson Lab talent & moves · August 12, 2026

Manus told users on Monday it’ll “soon resume operating as an independent company,” making public what four months of internal reversal had already accomplished: the unwinding of Meta’s roughly $2 billion acquisition of the Chinese-founded AI agent startup, at the direction of Beijing’s National Development and Reform Commission.

The deal closed on December 29, 2025. It survived barely three months in operational form. By April, the NDRC had issued a directive instructing the parties to withdraw the transaction on foreign-investment grounds, per CNBC. In May, Meta and Manus completed their split: data-sharing halted, an internal firewall erected, Manus staff cut off from Meta systems, Meta employees barred from using Manus tools. Meta had previously told AFP the transaction “complied fully with applicable law.” The regulator’s view prevailed anyway.

The pressure wasn’t only corporate. Co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao were required to appear before Chinese officials in Beijing in March and have been barred from leaving the country since, according to Quartz. Manus, founded in 2022, had relocated its formal headquarters to Singapore before the Meta deal, a piece of jurisdictional theater Beijing appears to have declined to accept.

“This marks a major turning point,” Wendy Chang, an analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, told AFP in April, adding that the message is directed “to its own tech leaders, more than to anybody else, that attempts to bypass national regulation will not be tolerated.”

For affected users, the split arrives as a data event. Anything generated from the December 29 close date onward is scheduled for deletion. The backup deadline is 7:59 p.m. EDT on August 22; deletions run August 23–24; restoration becomes available starting August 25. “This is part of our separation from Meta,” the company told users. “We must take this step to comply with regulatory requirements in specific parts of the world.”

The capital table is reassembling in real time. Reuters reported in July that Tencent is in talks to become Manus’ largest shareholder. The Financial Times reports many former investors are in discussions to retake stakes at the same $2 billion valuation Meta paid. Quartz reports the co-founders separately explored raising roughly $1 billion from outside investors to fund a buyback, with a Hong Kong IPO floated as a longer-term outcome.

Meta, for its part, is routing around the loss. It shipped its first coding agent last week and announced a new model, Glimmer, on Monday, developed in part on its Muse Spark line. The agent tier of Meta’s product roadmap now advances without the asset it paid $2 billion to acquire eight months ago. The NDRC’s April letter, in retrospect, was the more consequential document.

Sources