AI AND ML<\/p>\n
Manus AI will delete some data to satisfy legal requirements<\/p>\n
China\u2019s decision not to allow Meta to acquire local AI outfit Manus AI has become reality, with the upstart advising users it will soon \u201creturn to operating as an independent company.\u201d<\/p>\n
Manus burst onto the AI scene in March 2025<\/a> with a \u201cgeneral agent\u201d that allowed users assign tasks to an AI. To illustrate its powers, Manus claimed it could select the best candidate for a job by evaluating job applications stored in a .ZIP file, which it would open and read, then assess against user-defined criteria, before writing a document that ranked the best applications. All that work happened inside a virtual PC that Manus\u2019s agents drove without human help to do the job.<\/p>\n The service quickly gathered many enthusiastic users and claimed to have hit a $100 million run rate. AI companies always need stacks of cash to buy and run more GPUs. To find it, Manus moved its official headquarters from China to investor-friendly Singapore.<\/p>\n In December 2025, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided<\/a> to acquire Manus and said he planned to use its tech across The Social Network\u2019s AI products.<\/p>\n \u201cManus’s exceptional talent will join Meta’s team to deliver general-purpose agents across our consumer and business products, including in Meta AI,\u201d according to Meta\u2019s acquisition announcement.<\/p>\n Beijing had other ideas and in early 2026 launched<\/a> an investigation into the acquisition. By April, Chinese regulators had decided to forbid<\/a> foreign investment in Manus.<\/p>\n Meta decided not to fight China over the matter and started disentangling itself from Manus.<\/p>\n That effort seems near complete because on Tuesday Manus published a note<\/a> to its users that opens \u201cManus will soon return to operating as an independent company.\u201d<\/p>\n The separation from Meta won\u2019t be painless because Manus says legal matters mean it must delete some user data generated since December 29, 2025. The company will type rm -rf on August 24. Customers who download their data before then can restore it to Manus from August 25.<\/p>\n Meta hasn\u2019t said how or if it will replace Manus\u2019s tech, or if it learned enough during its brief time working with the Chinese company to get what it needed to build the superintelligence<\/a> Zuck this week promised to bring us all.<\/p>\n The whole incident now serves as an example of China\u2019s determination to keep control of local innovators, rather than let them leave the country in search of foreign investment. Yet at the same time, China is using open-weight models<\/a> to challenge American model-makers. \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI AND ML Manus AI will delete some data to satisfy legal requirements China\u2019s decision not to allow…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":735525,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-735524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=735524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735524\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/735525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=735524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=735524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=735524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}