China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has ordered Meta to undo its $2bn acquisition of artificial-intelligence app Manus, an extraordinary late-stage intervention that lands less than three weeks before a planned Trump–Xi summit. The deal was announced in December and closed earlier this year; Meta had already begun integrating Manus's software into its own products.
Manus was founded in China in 2022 by Butterfly Effect before relocating its headquarters and core team to Singapore in 2025 following a funding round led by US venture firm Benchmark Capital. Beijing has demanded that the parties fully reverse the transaction — return capital, re-register ownership and stop Meta from using the Manus algorithm — and warned of penalties, business restrictions and possible criminal charges if they fail to comply. Regulators began their probe in January under foreign-investment, antitrust and export-control rules; in March, two Manus co-founders were barred from leaving China. People close to the case told the FT that fully unwinding a closed deal is "hard" and that the move may be primarily a deterrent against similar transactions.
This is the second high-profile foreign deal Beijing has tried to reshape, after the CK Hutchison sale of 43 ports to a BlackRock-backed group, where authorities pushed for a Chinese co-investor. The Manus order signals that even AI assets with Chinese roots and a foreign holding company are now politically contested. Source: Financial Times, 27 April 2026, Arjun Neil Alim and Tim Bradshaw.