Zuck buys Chinese AI company Manus that claims it deals in actions, not words

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 ...