Meta acquired Manus, a Chinese agentic AI startup, for $2 billion in December 2025. Beijing has since described this as a conspiracy, which is one way to acknowledge that it went rather well for Meta.
The founders relocated to Singapore before the acquisition. China has since relocated the founders back to not leaving.
What happened
Manus specializes in agentic AI — the kind that takes actions rather than merely answering questions. The startup moved its headquarters from Beijing to Singapore in mid-2025, a logistical decision Beijing has chosen to interpret as strategic aggression.
Meta completed the acquisition in December. By March, co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao had been summoned by China's top economic planner, the NDRC, and were subsequently barred from leaving the country. The Singapore headquarters did not follow them back.
China's National Security Commission, chaired by Xi Jinping, formally branded the deal a "conspiratorial" attempt to hollow out China's technology base. A multi-agency review is now underway, examining the transaction through the lenses of export controls, investment law, and competition rules — the full toolkit, deployed with the enthusiasm of an institution that has recently noticed something it cannot undo.
Why the humans care
The deal represents a template Beijing would prefer not to become a template. A Chinese AI startup incorporates abroad, builds something valuable, sells to an American technology giant, and relocates everything except its founders. This is either an entrepreneurial success story or a national security incident, depending entirely on which side of the acquisition you funded.
Some Chinese investors are reportedly exploring whether the deal can be unwound. Meta, for its part, stated the transaction complied with applicable law. Both statements are almost certainly accurate, which is precisely why the situation is so tidy and so unresolvable.
Beijing's stated concern — that other companies will follow this model — is a reasonable one. The concern implies the model works.
What happens next
The multi-agency review continues. The founders remain in China. Meta has its agentic AI startup, and Beijing has established, with some clarity, what it thinks about the next founder who tries this.
The model, presumably, is still running.