Well, that’s why the US and China are in an all-out race to create the most powerful artificial intelligence on the planet. Beijing is pouring billions into domestic models, tightening controls on the tech sector and frantically chasing top AI talent. Attracts US companies. Still, Manus, one of China’s buzziest AI startups, quietly moved to Singapore and sold itself to Meta for $2 billion.
Someone thought it would no will this relationship be calculated?
As industry watchers know, Manus hit the scene last spring with a demo video showing an AI agent screening job candidates, scheduling vacations and analyzing a stock portfolio, which it claimed was superior to OpenAI’s Deep Research. Within weeks, Benchmark—the quintessential Silicon Valley venture firm—led a $75 million funding round valued at $500 million. It was surprising. (Senator John Cornyn had ideas, tweet at the time, “Do American investors think it’s a good idea to subsidize our biggest competitor in artificial intelligence, only for the CCP to use this technology to challenge us economically and militarily? I don’t.”)
By December, Manus had millions of users and generated more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Then Meta came calling, and Mark Zuckerberg, who had entrusted the company’s future to artificial intelligence, raised it for $2 billion. This was also surprising.
It’s worth noting that Manus didn’t just sell himself to an American buyer; It has spent the better part of the past year trying to operate outside China’s orbit. The company moved its headquarters and core team from Beijing to Singapore, restructured its ownership, and after the Meta deal was announced, Meta promised to cut all ties Manus met with its Chinese investors and completely shut down its operations in China. Manus was trying to make itself a Singaporean company by all means.
But if this series of events raised eyebrows in Washington, you can only imagine they were apoplectic in Beijing.
China has a phrase for all of this: “sale of young plants” — local AI companies that move abroad and sell their immature selves to foreign buyers, taking their intellectual property and talent with them.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Beijing hates it, too, and has spent years making sure no company operates beyond its reach. Surely we all remember Jack Ma giving a speech in 2020 mildly criticizing Chinese regulators, after which he disappeared from public life for months, Ant Group’s blockbuster IPO was killed overnight, and Alibaba was fined $2.8 billion. Then China spent the next two years methodically dismantling its booming technology sector, destroying hundreds of billions in market value. Chinese leaders are many things, but subtlety is not one of them.
So it was no surprise, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday that Manus co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao had been summoned to a meeting with China’s National Development and Reform Commission this month, and they said. would not leave the country for a while.
No formal charges have been filed — just an inquiry into whether the Meta deal violated Beijing’s foreign investment rules.
Beijing calls it a routine regulatory review.
At some point, someone on Manus probably thought they got away with it, and maybe they still do. But given the stakes of the AI race, it was always a big gamble. Now Beijing wants answers; The founders of Manus apparently aren’t going anywhere until they get them.
