China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus

> After a $75 million fundraising round led by U.S. venture firm Benchmark in May 2025, Manus shut its China offices in July, laying off dozens of employees. It then moved its operations to Singapore.

> It was not immediately clear on what grounds China was seeking the annulment of a deal involving a Singapore-based company and how, if at all, a completed acquisition transaction would be unwound.

> Manus' two co-founders, CEO Xiao Hong and chief scientist Ji Yichao, were summoned to Beijing for talks with regulators in March and later barred from leaving the country, five sources familiar with the matter said.

Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

This just PRC finally applying their version of US export controls, i.e. PRC gets to control PRC originated algos, same argument as TikTok. The founders aren't held "hostage", they're under investigation for violating export control and national security laws. PRC hinted signalled pretty clearly they would use art12 (catch all clause) of export control laws and offshore affiliate rules (to address Singapore loophole) before Manus deal closed - Manus ignored loud hints. The difference is PRC wasn't super judicious in enforcing AI related export controls (especially since agent development new hence art12), US would have ensured this control list tech wouldn't leave US territory via foreign product rule / CFIUS / BIS. PRC gave pretty clear signals to Manus what was going to happen hoping they'd unwind on their own, but they didn't so now they're going to eat shit.

PRC still haven't gone the step up to ban PRC strategic talent from working in US like US has for PRC semi. Don't be surprised in 5-10 years US has to hire PRC workers with obfuscated identities like PRC dealing with US/TW talent in PRC EUV. Plenty more room how these things can escalate depending on how serious PRC starts to treat dual use AI.

interesting. Manus is nominally a Singapore based company and should be immune to these actions. Tiktok argued that it was headquartered in Singapore with a Singaporean CEO. breaking singapore’s fig leaf might prove problematic in the long run.

>not immediately clear on what grounds China was seeking the annulment of a deal involving a Singapore-based company and how, if at all, a completed acquisition transaction would be unwound.

Interesting. I wonder what sorts of threats China could make to back up this demand, or if this is more of a warning for future acquisitions in the space.

Funny when you consider the world owes a lot of AI advancements to both Meta and Google, their open releases really did shift things, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, especially for China, which as far as I know were not releasing as much in AI as they have been beforehand. I remember when Meta released Llama originally people were speculating about it, but it wound up producing a lot of projects that used it, I'm sure some in China. I know that Perplexity has its own custom model on top of Llama that they use for their default model, and its pretty darn good.

Besides the fact that the founders are in China and are barred from leaving, is there anything that prevents Manus/Meta from just telling the CCP to kick rocks?

Sure they can object to it or claim they are "blocking" the sale, but is there really anything they can do considering that Manus is no longer within their jurisdiction?

The… hands of fate?

Obviously. With the US first controlling Venezuelan energy supplies to China and then cutting of Iranian energy supplies to China (as well as to the EU), what do you expect?

China isn't as stupid as the EU, which just says thanks and would you perhaps like to blow up another pipeline?

Hormuz will stay closed by the pirates. LNG terminals are already built in Alaska to supply the Asian "allies", whose economy the US also ruins.

If the EU had any backbone, it would cut off the US from ASML.

Funny that Manus already shows "by meta" along with the logo pretty prominently.

This will be awkward, given the acquisition is already complete

Can we finally acknowledge the obvious Singapore-washing that Chinese companies have been doing for years or are we going to keep pretending?

Poor Meta. AI is really just not working out for them.

Manus is saved, 2 billion is such an undervaluation considering much worse companies like minimax is valued at 30 billion.

So China is just claiming that anyone who is ethnically Chinese should be pressured? Manus is in Singapore and has no direct connections to China physically and financially. SG offices, SG product, SG founders with family on the mainland.

What leverage does China have here to enforce this? Meta doesn't do business in China. Can't they just give them the middle finger?