Artificial intelligence startup Manus announced on Tuesday that it will return to independent ownership after Chinese regulators forced Facebook parent company Meta to abandon its acquisition.
The decision concludes an unprecedented unwinding of an already completed transaction, coming nearly four months after authorities in Beijing ordered the American technology giant to cancel the deal.
Regulatory intervention in $2 billion acquisition
Meta, the California-based owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, had announced the purchase of Manus on December 29 for approximately $2 billion. At the time, Meta promised to bring the leading artificial intelligence tool to billions of users worldwide.
However, in late April, China's National Development and Reform Commission, the top economic planning agency responsible for overseeing major investments, banned the operation. The regulatory body demanded that the involved parties renounce the acquisition transaction, offering no further public explanation for its decision.
Manus was originally founded in Beijing in 2022 by technology firm Butterfly Effect before launching its product in March 2025. The company subsequently transferred its corporate headquarters to Singapore six months prior to agreeing to the Meta takeover.
Crackdown on Singapore corporate relocations
The Manus platform operates as an artificial intelligence agent, a class of software capable of executing complex multi-step workflows independently based on a single prompt. Unlike traditional conversational chatbots, the tool can perform actions such as booking travel arrangements, screening job candidates, and analyzing market trends. Following its launch, Chinese industry analysts quickly touted Manus as the new DeepSeek, referencing the prominent Chinese AI firm.
The regulatory blocking has turned the deal into a textbook case regarding the practice known as Singapore-washing. The term describes Chinese technology firms relocating their legal headquarters to the Southeast Asian city-state to raise international capital, avoid stringent domestic regulations, or target global customers without bearing a distinctly Chinese corporate image.
Wendy Chang, a researcher at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, a Berlin-based think tank, told AFP in April that Beijing had previously tolerated such corporate moves. She stated that the action against Manus represented a major policy turning point, intended primarily as a clear signal to domestic technology executives that attempts to circumvent national regulations would not be permitted.
Buyback negotiations and strategic loss for Meta
On July 10, the Financial Times reported that former Manus investors, led by Chinese gaming and social media giant Tencent, were negotiating to buy back the startup from Meta at the original $2 billion valuation. Under the proposed transaction structure, Tencent would become the largest shareholder while maintaining a minority stake.
The loss of Manus comes at a difficult moment for Meta as it seeks to maintain competitiveness in the rapidly advancing artificial intelligence market. Trailing behind rivals in the race to build cutting-edge models, the American group announced on Monday that it was renewing its focus on open-source models, software whose code is made publicly available for external developers. Meta was previously a leading advocate for open-source AI through its Llama model family before backing away late in 2025 following disappointing performance results.
Data deletion scheduled for platform users
Users of the Manus platform will be directly impacted by Meta's retreat from the deal. Manus specified that data generated by a portion of its user base since the acquisition took effect will be permanently deleted on August 23 and August 24.
The company has advised affected customers that they have until August 23 to download and back up their personal files and data before the deletion begins.
