China blocks the Manus sale, leaving a multibillion-dollar deal hanging in the balance: a firm “no” to Mark Zuckerberg

For several decades, the world lived under the shadow of the geopolitical tension stemming from the Cold War. Boycotts, diplomatic incidents, trade exclusions… With the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the rise of globalization and multilateralism, it seemed that all those kinds of controversies would fade into the past.

In 2019, the Huawei case already showed us that things were not going to be quite so simple.

But everything seems to have become far more complicated since the beginning of the second Trump era. And the fallout has been varied, wide-ranging and, in some cases, surprising.

Ah, yes, and worth billions.

In an unexpected twist, Meta’s multibillion-dollar acquisition of Manus is about to have a very bad ending for the company led by Mark Zuckerberg, just a few months after the deal was signed.

Goodbye to the Manus acquisition?

China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has blocked the acquisition of Manus, the AI agent startup that Meta had acquired in late 2025. In a statement, it explained that “it has decided to prohibit foreign investment in the Manus project in accordance with the applicable laws and regulations, and has required the parties involved to withdraw the acquisition transaction.”

Although the company had moved to Singapore to operate under international law, the Chinese agency is claiming jurisdiction on the grounds that the intellectual property and talent were originally developed in Beijing, challenging the deal, valued at more than $2 billion, under national security criteria and over possible violations of rules governing foreign investment and technology transfer

The situation has become highly complicated, to the point that, according to some reports, two of its founders have had their ability to leave China restricted while the regulatory investigation unfolds, leaving Meta in an extremely difficult position, with a technology that was already being integrated into its platforms and teams that are already operating from its global offices.

For its part, the American company has not issued an official statement, but a Meta spokesperson told specialized outlet TechCrunch that “the transaction fully complied with applicable legislation. We expect an appropriate resolution to the investigation.”

The end of technological Singapore-washing

All right, Singapore matters here, so let us pause on that for a moment.

Until now, some companies, startups like this one, were moving their legal headquarters from China to Singapore to sidestep local legislation and make it easier to sell themselves to American giants. The Manus case shows that Beijing is no longer willing to accept this escape route. For the NDRC, if the source code, the founders, and the initial development of the technology took place on Chinese soil, the company remains under its national jurisdiction, regardless of where its main office is registered.

AI as a battleground

This block comes in the context of the hardware restrictions imposed by Washington. While the United States is trying to choke China’s ability to manufacture advanced chips, China is responding by tightening control over talent and technologies considered strategic, especially in the field of artificial intelligence. AI is becoming a national security asset, on par with energy or weapons.

The challenge of undoing what is already integrated

The order to fully unwind the deal is technically a nightmare. Meta has already integrated Manus technology into its operations and relocated 100 employees to its offices. Undoing an acquisition of this kind is not like returning a product to a store; it involves separating databases, algorithms already learning from Meta users, and resolving international employment contracts. The legal conflict could last for years while the technology in question continues operating in a limbo of ownership.

Direct impact on agencies and advertisers

Part of the interest (and the hype) surrounding Manus, which motivated its acquisition, has to do with how its technology works. Its flagship product was a general-purpose autonomous AI agent designed to complete tasks and deliver final outputs. Users could delegate market research, programming, or data analysis projects from start to finish, while the agent plans, executes, and delivers production-ready work products.

At the time of Meta’s acquisition, the company claimed it was growing by more than 20% month over month since the release of Manus 1.5, thanks in part to how easily it could integrate with other technologies. Manus can connect with Gmail, Notion, Stripe, HubSpot, Slack, Google Calendar, Google Drive, GitHub, and Hugging Face, among other services, through prebuilt MCP connectors (an open standard designed to connect AI assistants with external tools), and also with internal systems through custom MCP servers.

As we saw recently, there are already companies and agencies that have integrated Manus into their processes, in areas such as Paid Media. This reversal creates a problem if Meta is forced to unplug Manus’s connectors in order to comply with Beijing. In that case, they could lose their report automation, real-time competitive analysis, and content generation tools.

Image: ChatGPT