Manus relaunches, Meta eats it

• Source: manus.im/app (found on the OpenAI Devpost orbit, 2026-08-25)
• Verdict: keep — promote-to-tech if the long version is wanted

The timeline of a beautiful disaster

• Early 2025: Manus — an AI agent from Beijing's Butterfly Effect that does your research reports and slide decks — goes full invite-code mania. State TV cheers it. Everyone says "China's next DeepSeek."
• Mid 2025: The founders Singapore-wash the company. New Singapore HQ, Cayman Islands parent, China staff laid off, Chinese online presence scrubbed. They even decline Beijing's requests for meetings and investment. The costume is designed to make them sellable to the West.
• Dec 29, 2025: Meta buys it for a reported $2–2.5 billion. "Bring a leading agent to billions."
• Jan 2026: Beijing opens a review and bars both co-founders from leaving China while it runs.
• Apr 27, 2026: The NDRC prohibits the deal on national security grounds and orders it withdrawn. The stated target: the "Singapore-washing" pattern itself.
• Aug 2026: Unwinding completes. A Tencent-led consortium (with HSG and ZhenFund) buys the company back from Meta; the founders regain control. Meta-era user data gets deleted wholesale on Aug 23–24 — data generated after Dec 29 ceases to exist, like an ex scrubbed from the photos. The app relaunches today as "independent."

The ironies, itemized

1. The founders did everything right by Western M&A logic — offshore structure, scrubbed roots, declined Beijing's money — and that exact preparation is what Beijing ruled a national security threat. The costume was the crime.
2. Meta paid billions for an asset another government simply refused to let them own. There is no diligence checklist item called "will the NDRC allow this to exist," but there is now.
3. The founders who snubbed Beijing's meetings got travel-banned by Beijing. The government they avoided ended up holding the veto over their exit anyway.
4. The buyback hands the company to a Tencent-led consortium — so the "independent" relaunch is independent from Meta specifically, which was the only thing Beijing ever objected to.
5. Somewhere in Singapore there's an integration team that spent eight months wiring Manus into Instagram, now deleting the user data as part of the separation. That's a whole career of work with a government-ordered backspace key.

Both superpowers now hold a kill switch over your startup, and the market rate for finding that out is about two billion dollars.