This is a very interesting development, which potentially demonstrates the power and strategic impact of U.S. outbound investment restrictions into Chinese AI firms. Here's a brief history of the saga of @ManusAI: - Manus began as a China-based start-up that makes AI agents, which reportedly utilized Anthropic's Claude models. In April 2025 Manus raised $75 million from U.S. investors at a $500 million valuation. - After news broke of its April fundraising round, Manus abruptly moved its headquarters from China to Singapore--presumably to avoid running afoul of U.S. restrictions on outbound investments into Chinese AI firms, which likely would have required the U.S. investors to divest from Manus following an inevitable investigation by the U.S. Treasury Department. - Over summer 2025, Manus reportedly shut down all its China operations: it closed its offices in China, stopped its work with Alibaba on new AI agents, and abandoned plans to release a version of its app in China. - On December 29, 2025, @alexandr_wang announced that @Meta is acquiring Manus. If the reporting is true that Manus completely abandoned its ties to China (a critical "if"), this story shows the power of U.S. outbound investment restrictions: they not only stop U.S. investors from supporting China's AI ecosystem, but they also incentivize sophisticated AI firms like Manus to abandon the Chinese AI ecosystem in favor of the U.S. AI ecosystem, which has access to deeper capital markets and more AI computing power (the latter due to U.S. export controls on AI chips). Neither the U.S. government nor the Chinese government would have permitted Meta to acquire Manus if it had remained based in Beijing. But once Manus fled China, likely as a result of U.S. outbound investment restrictions, the Chinese government lost its influence over Manus and its say in the transaction.