Manus has become an independent company again. Today, @ManusAI officially announced that it has resumed independent operations, with founder Xiao Hong and the original team continuing to lead the company. Its new positioning is “independent agent lab,” and it will continue developing general-purpose Agents to integrate more deeply into workflows, interact directly with external environments, and execute more complex tasks on users’ behalf. On December 29, 2025, Meta announced its acquisition of Manus. The transaction amount was not officially disclosed; Reuters estimated the valuation at $2–3 billion, while Bloomberg reported the deal size exceeded $2 billion. This acquisition was significant at the time because Manus was not a traditional “model-selling” company. Its true value lay in its Agent product, user base, and the operational task-execution system already in place. Meta already had models, computing power, and billions of users—but by late 2025, the entire industry had begun shifting from chatbots toward true Agents capable of operating software, invoking tools, and completing tasks for users. Manus was among the earliest general-purpose Agent products to gain global traction. Meta’s original plan was for Manus to continue operating independently while integrating its Agent capabilities into Meta AI and its consumer and enterprise product ecosystems. Had the deal proceeded normally, Manus likely would have become a relatively autonomous product and technology team within Meta’s broader Agent strategy. But things changed quickly. In April this year, Chinese regulators required Meta to unwind the acquisition, citing national security concerns and the transfer of Chinese AI technology and talent to a U.S. company. The most interesting point here is that before being acquired by Meta, Manus had already relocated its headquarters from China to Singapore. In other words, from a legal registration and operational structure standpoint, it had already attempted to position itself as an international company. Yet regulators clearly looked beyond just a registration certificate—origin of the founding team, where core technology was developed, and ongoing ties between employees and R&D systems and China were all likely under scrutiny. Over the past few years, many Chinese startups followed a common path to internationalization: relocating headquarters to Singapore, establishing offshore entities, raising capital in U.S. dollars, and serving global customers. This structure solved many financing and commercial challenges—but Manus demonstrated one key truth: at the level of major cross-border acquisitions, a company’s “nationality” is far harder to redefine than it might seem. After April, the market’s focus shifted from how Meta would integrate Manus to how the deal would be unwound. In May, Bloomberg revealed a dramatic proposal: founders Xiao Hong, Ji Yichao, and Zhang Tao were considering raising approximately $1 billion from external investors to buy Manus back from Meta. The proposed financing valuation was expected to match or exceed Meta’s original acquisition price of over $2 billion. Reports even mentioned discussions around forming a new joint venture and potential future listing in Hong Kong. It remains unclear which, if any, of these proposals were ultimately adopted. But beginning in June, technical and organizational separation had already begun: Meta started removing Manus from its internal systems; Meta employees could no longer use Manus for internal projects; and data sharing between the two parties ceased. At this point, the deal had effectively entered reverse integration. The true depth of the separation became evident in how user data was handled. On August 11, Manus issued an announcement stating it would resume independent operations and requested users in certain regions to back up their data in advance. Its official help documentation even explicitly defined December 29, 2025, as “Acquisition Day.” For affected users, task data, accounts, and connectors created after the acquisition must be deleted. Users are advised to export their data first; once Manus’s independent systems are fully restored, they can manually restore their information. This shows that “resuming independence” goes far beyond changing shareholders or re-registering a company. At least some user data, account systems, and service infrastructure had already been incorporated into Meta’s post-acquisition architecture—and now those boundaries must be rebuilt from scratch. Therefore, today’s announcement should be understood more accurately as: the months-long separation between Manus and Meta has been largely completed at the product and operational levels. But several key questions remain unanswered: First: Does Meta still hold any equity in Manus? If so, how much? Second: Through what structure did the founding team regain control of the company? Was the reported $1 billion financing round actually completed? Third: How much did Meta actually pay in this transaction—and how much did it recover? Fourth: Will there be any future collaboration between the two parties in areas such as models, infrastructure, or business? One thing is certain: Manus has once again become an independent Agent company controlled by its original founding team. But these eight months have left behind a more practical question: Can Chinese AI companies that relocate their headquarters to Singapore, establish offshore structures in U.S. dollars, and pursue global business truly be regarded as ordinary global tech companies? Perhaps during fundraising stages—but at the scale of billion-dollar acquisitions, the answer is far more complex.