Okay, so the U.S. and China are locked in an all-out race to build the most powerful AI on the planet. Beijing is throwing billions at homegrown models, tightening its grip on the tech sector, and watching nervously as its best AI talent gravitates to U.S. companies. Yet Manus — one of China’s most buzzed-about AI startups — quietly relocated to Singapore and sold itself to Meta for $2 billion.
Did anyone think there would not be a reckoning over this tie-up?
As industry watchers know, Manus burst onto the scene in the spring of last year with a demo video showing an AI agent screening job candidates, planning vacations, and analyzing stock portfolios, and it cheekily claimed it outperformed OpenAI’s Deep Research. Within weeks, Benchmark — the consummate Silicon Valley venture firm — led a $75 million funding round at a $500 million valuation. That was surprising. (Senator John Cornyn had thoughts, tweeting at the time, “Who thinks it is a good idea for American investors to subsidize our biggest adversary in AI, only to have the CCP use that technology to challenge us economically and militarily? Not me.”)
By December, Manus had millions of users and was pulling in over $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Then Meta came calling, and Mark Zuckerberg, who has staked the company’s future on AI, snapped it up for $2 billion. That, too, was surprising.
It’s worth noting that Manus didn’t just sell itself to an American buyer; it spent the better part of last year actively trying to operate outside China’s orbit. The company relocated its headquarters and core team from Beijing t …