Well, the United States and China are in an all-out competition to create the most powerful AI on the planet. China is investing billions of dollars in its own development model, tightening its grip on the technology sector and anxiously watching as top AI talent gravitates to American companies. But Manus, one of China’s hottest AI startups, quietly moved to Singapore and was sold to Meta for $2 billion.
Did anyone think that would happen? ~ no Can you rate this partnership?
As industry insiders know, Manus burst onto the scene last spring with demo videos showing AI agents screening job candidates, planning vacations, and analyzing stock portfolios, and brazenly claimed to outperform OpenAI’s Deep Research. Within weeks, Benchmark, a prominent Silicon Valley venture firm, led a $75 million funding round at a $500 million valuation. I was really surprised. (Senator John Cornyn tweeted at the time, “Who thinks it’s a good idea for American investors to subsidize our biggest enemy in AI and allow the Chinese Communist Party to use that technology to challenge us economically and militarily? Not me.”)
By December, Manus had millions of users and over $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Then Meta came calling, and Mark Zuckerberg, who had staked the company’s future on AI, bought it for $2 billion. That was surprising too.
It’s worth noting that Manus didn’t just sell to American buyers. It spent most of last year actively operating outside China’s orbit. The company moved its headquarters and core team from Beijing to Singapore, reorganized its ownership, and after the Meta deal was announced, Meta pledged to cut all ties with Manus’ Chinese investors and cease operations in China entirely. In every way, Manus has tried to make itself a Singaporean company.
But if the series of events raised eyebrows in Washington, one can only imagine that they were extremely shocking in Beijing.
In China, there’s an expression for all this: “selling young crops.” That is, domestic AI companies that go overseas and take their intellectual property and talent by selling themselves to foreign buyers before they are fully mature.
Tech Crunch Event
San Francisco, California
|
October 13-15, 2026
Beijing hates this, too, and has spent years establishing that no company operates beyond its reach. Surely we all remember when Jack Ma gave a speech in 2020 mildly criticizing Chinese regulators. He then disappeared from public life for months, Ant Group’s blockbuster IPO collapsed overnight, and Alibaba was fined $2.8 billion. China then spent the next two years systematically dismantling its booming technology sector, wiping out hundreds of billions of dollars in market value. Chinese leaders are many things, but subtlety is not one of them.
So it was no surprise when the Financial Times reported that Manus co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao were summoned to a meeting of China’s National Development and Reform Commission this month and said they would not be leaving China for some time.
No formal charges have been filed. However, there is only an investigation into whether the Meta deal violated Beijing’s foreign investment rules.
Beijing is calling this a periodic regulatory review.
At some point, someone on Manus probably thought they had solved this problem, and probably still do. But considering the risks of AI competition, that was always a big gamble. Now Beijing wants answers. It seems the founders of Manus aren’t going anywhere until they get them.
