UPDATED Meta will acquire made-in-China AI outfit Manus and harness its “general agent” technology across its products.

Manus debuted in March 2025 and immediately pitched itself as a leap beyond generative AI chatbots, which it characterizes as best suited to summarizing information and answering questions.

The outfit promotes its own services as enabling “wide research and context-aware reasoning to produce actionable results in the format you need.”

To illustrate that promise, Manus offers a scenario in which users ask its tech to select the best candidate for an job by evaluating job applications stored in a .ZIP file. Manus can open that archive, read the files it contains, evaluate them according to user-defined criteria, then produce a document that ranks candidates by suitability for the role.

The service does that in its own “computer” – a cloud-hosted VM – that Manus says “operates as a multi-agent system powered by several distinct models.”

Manus was created by a Chinese company called Butterfly Effect, which also operates an entity in Hong Kong an recently moved its headquarters to Singapore. The outfit recently claimed to have $100 million annual recurring revenue just eight months after launch.

Meta’s announcement of the deal states: “Manus is already serving the daily needs of millions of users and businesses worldwide” and reveals the made-in-China company’s staff will join the social networking giant. The value of the deal was not disclosed.

Manus hailed its acquisition as “validation of our pioneering work with General AI Agents.”

“Our solution is driving value for millions of users worldwide today. With time, we hope to expand this subscription to the millions of businesses and billions of people on Meta’s platforms,” Manus’s post states, before adding a canned quote from CEO Xiao Hong who said joining the Zuckosphere represents a chance to “build on a stronger, more sustainable foundation without changing how Manus works or how decisions are made.”

“We’re excited about what the future holds with Meta and Manus working together and we will continue to iterate the product and serve users that have defined Manus from the beginning.”

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Meta boss-for-life Mark Zuckerberg wants to build a “superintelligence” service, which he defines as software “that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them.”

In pursuit of that goal, Meta has committed to at least $70 billion of capital expenditure in 2025 and expects to spend more next year, much of it going towards building datacenters to host AI workloads. While the company credits AI with helping it to improve advertising revenue, Meta does not currently offer a paid AI service but is reportedly testing a subscription product called “Meta AI+”.

Manus seems a good fit for that offering, and perhaps also a step towards superintelligence.

The deal is the fifth AI-related acquisition Meta has made in 2025, following its purchases of AI startups PlayAI and WaveForms, accelerator developer Rivos, and wearable device developer Limitless. The social networking giant has also dangled eight-figure compensation packages to lure top AI talent to the company. ®

UPDATED AT 04:00 UTC December 30

to note a report from Nikkei in which Meta said Manus will sever ties to Chinese investors and will not operate in China.