{"id":392585,"date":"2026-01-07T06:50:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T06:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/392585\/"},"modified":"2026-01-07T06:50:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T06:50:08","slug":"china-reviews-metas-purchase-of-ai-startup-manus-ft-reports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/392585\/","title":{"rendered":"China reviews Meta&#8217;s purchase of AI startup Manus, FT reports"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"yf-vbsvxt\">Jan 6 (Reuters) &#8211; Chinese officials are reviewing Meta&#8217;s (<a data-i13n=\"cpos:1;pos:1\" href=\"https:\/\/finance.yahoo.com\/quote\/META\" data-ylk=\"slk:META;cpos:1;pos:1;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas\" class=\"link \" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">META<\/a>) $2 billion acquisition of <a href=\"https:\/\/tech.yahoo.com\/ai\/\" data-ylk=\"slk:artificial intelligence;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas\" class=\"link \" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">artificial intelligence<\/a> startup Manus \u200bfor possible technology control violations, the Financial Times \u200creported on Tuesday, citing two people familiar with the matter.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-vbsvxt\">Reuters \u200ccould not immediately verify the report. Meta and Manus did not immediately respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-vbsvxt\">Chinese commerce ministry officials began assessing whether the relocation of Manus&#8217; \u2060staff and technology \u200cto Singapore and the consequent sale to Meta required an export license under \u200dChinese law, the report said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-vbsvxt\">While the review is in its preliminary stages and may not lead to a formal investigation, \u200bthe need for a license could provide Beijing \u200cwith an avenue to influence the transaction, including, in an extreme case, trying to force the parties to abandon the deal, the report added.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-vbsvxt\">Meta acquired Manus last month, when a source familiar with the \u2060matter told Reuters that the \u200bdeal values the Singapore-based firm \u200bat between $2 billion and $3 billion.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-vbsvxt\">Manus went viral early this year on X after it released \u200dwhat it \u2060claimed was the world&#8217;s first general AI agent, capable of making decisions and executing tasks autonomously, \u2060with much less prompting required than AI chatbots such as \u200cChatGPT and DeepSeek.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-vbsvxt\">(Reporting by Gnaneshwar Rajan in Bengaluru; \u200cEditing by Rashmi Aich)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jan 6 (Reuters) &#8211; Chinese officials are reviewing Meta&#8217;s (META) $2 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence startup Manus&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":392586,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[28,30840,190372,35407,1282,190371],"class_list":["post-392585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-chinese-officials","tag-export-license","tag-manus","tag-meta","tag-technology-control"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392585\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}