Manus, the Singapore-based AI agent startup Meta bought for more than two billion dollars in late 2025, is now on its way back to its original owners. Early investors, including HSG, ZhenFund, and Tencent, are reportedly working on a buyback at roughly the same valuation Meta paid, with some backers exploring fresh capital raises to fund the deal. The trigger was not a change of heart inside Meta. It was a regulatory order from Beijing. UAE businesses watching how capital flows into AI deals can track related funding activity in our Funding section.
Meta acquired Manus to strengthen its position in agentic AI, the category of software that can carry out multi-step tasks with little human input. It is one of the fastest-growing corners of the AI industry right now, and Manus has built a real product around it. The deal looked like a straightforward win for Meta's roadmap.
Then, Chinese authorities opened a review into whether the transaction breached rules on technology exports, foreign investment, and national security. By April 2026, Beijing had reportedly ordered the parties to unwind it entirely, treating Manus' agentic AI capability as a strategic asset that should not sit under foreign ownership.
Meta has already started pulling back. Reports indicate the company has cut data-sharing ties with Manus and is unwinding the operational integration the two firms had been building. That separation is widely read as Meta positioning itself to comply with the divestment order rather than fight it.
What makes this story worth watching beyond the headline number is what happened to Manus while all this was playing on. The company kept growing. Its annualized revenue run rate has reportedly climbed to between four hundred and five hundred million dollars, up from roughly one hundred million when Meta first acquired it. Regulatory uncertainty did not slow the business down, even as ownership hung in limbo.
The most likely outcome now is a restructuring of Manus into a China-based joint venture, with a future Hong Kong listing on the table. For founders and investors building cross-border AI businesses, the case is a clear signal that ownership and control of advanced AI technology are now treated as national security questions, not just commercial ones. UAE-based AI ventures eyeing international capital should keep an eye on how regulatory scrutiny is shaping deal terms globally, a theme we track closely in our coverage of AI governance in the Middle East.
The bigger picture here matters for anyone raising capital in AI right now. Geopolitics is no longer a background risk factor in tech M&A; it is becoming a deal term. Investors structuring cross-border AI transactions are increasingly building in contingencies for exactly this kind of regulatory reversal, and the Manus situation will likely become the reference case other lawyers point to.
