China is investigating whether Meta’s acquisition of the artificial intelligence start-up Manus violated its laws on technology exports and outbound investment.
Those rules say the Chinese government must approve the export of certain technologies, including interactive A.I. systems. Manus is based in Singapore but was founded by Chinese engineers and had a Chinese parent company. Beijing has used the same grounds to claim final sign-off on any sale of the U.S. operations of TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
China’s Ministry of Commerce is evaluating whether Meta violated those rules when it acquired Manus last month, He Yadong, a ministry spokesman, said on Thursday.
Meta, which has not disclosed what it paid for Manus, declined to comment. Manus did not respond to requests for comment.
Manus drew attention from Silicon Valley last March when it introduced an A.I. agent, or tool, that could be directed to build websites and do other basic coding tasks on its own. At the time, the U.S. tech industry was reeling from the announcement that the Chinese start-up DeepSeek had created a high-performing A.I. system for far less than leading U.S. companies had spent. By December, Manus said it had surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
The deal is Meta’s second acquisition since the company was found not to have violated U.S. antitrust law in November. The Federal Trade Commission had sued Meta in 2020, claiming the company’s purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp illegally stifled competition. But a federal judge ultimately ruled that Meta had not created a monopoly in social networking through the deals and that the market had continued to expand with rivals including TikTok and YouTube.
With the lawsuit out of the way, the door for deal making is again open for Meta and the rest of Silicon Valley, experts said. Since the November ruling, Meta also agreed to acquire Limitless, an A.I. note-taking start-up.
Meta has been spending billions on A.I. researchers and data centers. In June, the company made its largest investment since its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp when it invested $14.3 billion in the start-up Scale AI.
China’s investigation into the Manus transaction comes amid questions about the fate of TikTok’s U.S. operations and whether regulators will block Chinese companies from gaining access to A.I. chips made by Nvidia, the American chip maker.
The deal further signifies Silicon Valley’s increasing reliance on Chinese A.I. talent, even as political tensions between China and the United States ramp up.
Beijing has pushed companies in China to buy domestic chips and warned that Nvidia’s chips might carry risks.
For many Chinese tech start-ups, the aspiration is to launch the next global hit product, like TikTok. Yet none wants to end up like ByteDance, whose executives were questioned before Congress about the company’s ties to the Chinese government.
The prospect of intense scrutiny from regulators in both Washington and Beijing has pushed Chinese entrepreneurs to choose between two paths for growth: catering to the Chinese market or pursuing a global audience outside China. For those without access to international investors, the first is the only feasible option.
Chinese officials need to weigh these enterprises’ prospects for growth when drawing up technology export regulations, Cui Fan, a professor at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, wrote in a blog post.
Manus trained its agent using A.I. systems built by other companies, including Alibaba of China and Anthropic of the United States. Two of the company’s early investors were former employees of Robinhood, the investing app.
- Credit: The New York Times
- By Meaghan TobinXinyun Wu and Eli Tan
