alt Hacker NewsChina blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus
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I don't think this has much to do with export control-- note that Manus, as impressive as it is, is still a wrapper around fundamental western models--, rather it has more to do with capital controls.
China has been trying to stop large scale outflow of businesses and individuals for quite some time, due to local politics concern. What Manus was doing, achieving successes first in China then setup a nominal shell company in Singapore, seems like a textbook case of flight (润）, which China is trying to prevent.
> After a $75 million fundraising round led by U.S. venture firm Benchmark in May 2025, Manus shut its China offices in July, laying off dozens of employees. It then moved its operations to Singapore.
> It was not immediately clear on what grounds China was seeking the annulment of a deal involving a Singapore-based company and how, if at all, a completed acquisition transaction would be unwound.
> Manus' two co-founders, CEO Xiao Hong and chief scientist Ji Yichao, were summoned to Beijing for talks with regulators in March and later barred from leaving the country, five sources familiar with the matter said.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out.
interesting. Manus is nominally a Singapore based company and should be immune to these actions. Tiktok argued that it was headquartered in Singapore with a Singaporean CEO. breaking singapore’s fig leaf might prove problematic in the long run.
Dictatorships do what dictatorships do. China is a dictatorship. Don't be surprised. Stop doing business with dictatorships.
Funny when you consider the world owes a lot of AI advancements to both Meta and Google, their open releases really did shift things, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, especially for China, which as far as I know were not releasing as much in AI as they have been beforehand. I remember when Meta released Llama originally people were speculating about it, but it wound up producing a lot of projects that used it, I'm sure some in China. I know that Perplexity has its own custom model on top of Llama that they use for their default model, and its pretty darn good.
the manus founders moved the entire company, researchers, and IP out of china to singapore. most of the researchers and business is still there, but unfortunately the founders wives/parents and family stayed in china. ultimately this is why they had to come back when the PRC summoned them after the meta acquisition.
sad day to be a chinese founder.
>not immediately clear on what grounds China was seeking the annulment of a deal involving a Singapore-based company and how, if at all, a completed acquisition transaction would be unwound.
Interesting. I wonder what sorts of threats China could make to back up this demand, or if this is more of a warning for future acquisitions in the space.
Chinese government blocks stupid American from overpaying for Chinese technology thereby missing out on free taxable revenue....
The… hands of fate?
I really wonder what the employee status gonna be like. It has been quite some time now, I think Meta and Manus are deeply binded lol. As a Manus user, I am liking the product. Sad to see social criticism of them and to see this news.
Besides the fact that the founders are in China and are barred from leaving, is there anything that prevents Manus/Meta from just telling the CCP to kick rocks?
Sure they can object to it or claim they are "blocking" the sale, but is there really anything they can do considering that Manus is no longer within their jurisdiction?
we all heard about manus, but who is actually using it?
> The Chinese government’s intervention in the transaction drew alarm among tech founders and venture capitalists in the country who were hoping to take advantage of the so-called Singapore-washing model, where companies relocate from China to the city-state to avoid scrutiny from Beijing and Washington.
If the US is going to treat AI technology as a strategic issue upon which it's going to play the national security card, it's not really valid to start the pearl-clutching when China does the same.
Seems like Manus and Meta thought they were going to be clever, and that China wasn't going to play any any of the cards they were holding. Even GPT-2 could've told them that was a dumb idea.
Can we finally acknowledge the obvious Singapore-washing that Chinese companies have been doing for years or are we going to keep pretending?
Funny that Manus already shows "by meta" along with the logo pretty prominently.
This must sting really hard for the founders.
Almost a billionaire. Only 1 step left. Then, it's blocked by China.
This will be awkward, given the acquisition is already complete
China will succeed, despite china.
Tit for tat. US administration thought they would contain China. Now Deepseek v4 is running on their home grown chips. US companies lost that hardware revenue and dependency instead.
Who cares after openclaw ?
Manus is saved, 2 billion is such an undervaluation considering much worse companies like minimax is valued at 30 billion.
What leverage does China have here to enforce this? Meta doesn't do business in China. Can't they just give them the middle finger?
So China is just claiming that anyone who is ethnically Chinese should be pressured? Manus is in Singapore and has no direct connections to China physically and financially. SG offices, SG product, SG founders with family on the mainland.
There has been a lot of discussion here on why the founders were detained and whether this is normal for other countries. All one has to do is look at what Chinese Communist Party has done to Uyghurs to understand how far they will go to neutralize opposing thought.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...
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Poor Meta. AI is really just not working out for them.
Obviously. With the US first controlling Venezuelan energy supplies to China and then cutting of Iranian energy supplies to China (as well as to the EU), what do you expect?
China isn't as stupid as the EU, which just says thanks and would you perhaps like to blow up another pipeline?
Hormuz will stay closed by the pirates. LNG terminals are already built in Alaska to supply the Asian "allies", whose economy the US also ruins.
If the EU had any backbone, it would cut off the US from ASML.
The governments need to keep their noses away from private companies, unless private companies turn to directly, or indirectly, limit their own competition using nefarious practises.
Politicians need to be kept in check, or else, they become dictators. If not, then it's just a matter of when, not if, that that transition happens.
This just PRC finally applying their version of US export controls, i.e. PRC gets to control PRC originated algos, same argument as TikTok. The founders aren't held "hostage", they're under investigation for violating export control and national security laws. PRC hinted signalled pretty clearly they would use art12 (catch all clause) of export control laws and offshore affiliate rules (to address Singapore loophole) before Manus deal closed - Manus ignored loud hints. The difference is PRC wasn't super judicious in enforcing AI related export controls (especially since agent development new hence art12), US would have ensured this control list tech wouldn't leave US territory via foreign product rule / CFIUS / BIS. PRC gave pretty clear signals to Manus what was going to happen hoping they'd unwind on their own, but they didn't so now they're going to eat shit.
PRC still haven't gone the step up to ban PRC strategic talent from working in US like US has for PRC semi. Don't be surprised in 5-10 years US has to hire PRC workers with obfuscated identities like PRC dealing with US/TW talent in PRC EUV. Plenty more room how these things can escalate depending on how serious PRC starts to treat dual use AI.