Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta’s agreement to acquire Manus for more than $2 billion — announced last night by both companies and reported in The Wall Street Journal — marks one of the clearest signals yet that large tech platforms are no longer just competing on model quality, but on who controls the execution layer of AI-powered work.Manus, a Singapore-based startup founded by Chinese entrepreneurs that debuted earlier this year, has built a general-purpose AI agent designed to autonomously carry out multi-step tasks such as research, analysis, coding, planning, and content generation. The company will continue operating from Singapore and selling its subscription product while its team and technology are integrated into Meta’s broader AI organization. Manus co-founder and CEO Xiao Hong, who goes by “Red,” is expected to report to Meta COO Javier Olivan.The deal arrives as Meta accelerates its AI investments to compete with Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI — and as the industry’s focus shifts from conversational demos to systems that can reliably produce artifacts, complete workflows, and operate with minimal supervision.Manus as an execution layer, not a chat interfaceManus has consistently positioned itself less as an assistant and more as an execution engine. Rather than answering isolated prompts, its agent is designed to plan tasks, invoke tools, iterate on intermediate outputs, and deliver finished work.It gained 2 million users on its waitlist alone after unveiling itself in spring 2025. At that time, Manus outperformed OpenAI’s Deep Research agent (powered then by the o3 model) and other state-of-the-art systems on the GAIA benchmark, which evaluates how well AI agents complete real-world, multi-step tasks, by more than 10% in some cases.And in the acquisition announcement last night, Manus said its system has processed more than 147 trillion tokens and created over 80 million virtual computers, metrics that suggest sustained, production-level usage rather than limited experimentation. Meta, meanwhile, said Manus can independently execute complex tasks such as market research, coding, and data analysis, and confirmed it will continue operating and selling the Manus service while integrating it into …
