{"id":18376,"date":"2026-04-27T13:07:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T13:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/18376\/"},"modified":"2026-04-27T13:07:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T13:07:09","slug":"china-blocks-metas-2b-acquisition-of-agentic-ai-startup-manus-report-tfn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/18376\/","title":{"rendered":"China blocks Meta\u2019s $2B acquisition of agentic AI startup Manus: report \u2014 TFN"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>China has stopped Meta from buying Manus, an agentic AI startup, for $2 billion and told both sides to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/world\/asia-pacific\/china-blocks-foreign-acquisition-ai-startup-manus-2026-04-27\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">cancel the deal<\/a>, Reuters reports. The National Development and Reform Commission said the decision was in line with laws and regulations but did not provide further details.<\/p>\n<p>The agentic AI market is expanding quickly worldwide, with Salesforce research predicting that by 2026,<a href=\"https:\/\/www.salesforce.com\/news\/stories\/connectivity-report-announcement-2026\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\"> 80% of enterprise apps<\/a> will have agent features. This helps explain why Meta offered so much for Manus and why China stepped in to keep the company local.<\/p>\n<p>Red Xiao Hong and Yichao \u201cPeak\u201d Ji founded Manus in 2022. The company <a href=\"https:\/\/techfundingnews.com\/after-deepseek-china-takes-a-leap-with-manus-worlds-first-autonomous-ai-agent\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">launched<\/a> its general AI agent in March 2025, raised $75 million at a $500 million valuation the next month, and reached over $100 million in annual revenue by December, when Meta announced the deal.<\/p>\n<p>Industry reports estimate the deal was worth between $2 billion and $3 billion, making it one of the biggest acquisitions of a Chinese AI startup.<\/p>\n<p>Unlike <a href=\"https:\/\/techfundingnews.com\/chatgpt-pro-launch-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-paid-version-and-more\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">ChatGPT<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/techfundingnews.com\/elon-musks-openai-rival-xai-to-raise-135m-of-its-1b-target\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Grok<\/a>, which answer user prompts, Manus runs in the cloud and can carry out complex tasks like analysing the S&amp;P 500 or writing sales pitches on its own, without human help.  On the GAIA benchmark, which tests real-world multi-step tasks, Manus beat OpenAI\u2019s Deep Research agent by more than 10 percentage points in some areas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"China has stopped Meta from buying Manus, an agentic AI startup, for $2 billion and told both sides&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18377,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4211,179,7493,24,387,66,156],"class_list":{"0":"post-18376","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-agentic-ai","8":"tag-acquisition","9":"tag-agentic-ai","10":"tag-agentic-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-ai","12":"tag-china","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-us"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}