China orders Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of Manus

The NDRC’s Office of the Working Mechanism for Foreign Investment Security Review issued a formal cancellation order on Monday, four months after the deal was announced. Manus co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao have been barred from leaving China since March. 

China’s National Development and Reform Commission has formally ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of Manus, the agentic AI startup, in a brief statement issued by the Office of the Working Mechanism for Foreign Investment Security Review on Monday.

The NDRC’s instruction represents the end of a four-month regulatory process that began almost immediately after the deal was announced in December 2025, escalated to exit bans on Manus’s co-founders in March 2026, and has now concluded with China’s most direct intervention in a US technology acquisition of a Chinese-founded company since the beginning of the current trade war cycle.

Manus was founded ...