Meta wants to acquire the Chinese startup Manus AI; Beijing responds by barring the founders from leaving China. It is not just control over technology but control over individuals that represents the new frontier of strategic knowledge dominance. A reflection by Andrea Monti, professor of digital identity, privacy, and cybersecurity at Sapienza University of Rome – Originally published on Formiche.net
Manus AI is one of the many startups crowding the Chinese industrial landscape (particularly in the high-tech sector). The fledgling company has attracted market interest for having developed, in its own words, the first general-purpose autonomous agent based on AI. Manus’s technology is not without its flaws, nor is it truly revolutionary, but this has not prevented it from attracting the interest of Meta, which initiated an acquisition process that was later blocked in late March 2026 by the Beijing authorities.
Why “agents” are important
For some time now, computers and other devices have been interacting at the operating system and individual application levels with the infrastructures of Big Tech and app developers to the point that the absence of a network connection can cause a specific program or the entire device to malfunction. Already today, therefore, users are constantly monitored and their devices regularly scanned by an unknown number of software programs that track everything that happens.
Agents—which in themselves are not expressions of hyper-sophisticated technologies—shift control to a further level because, in order to function autonomously, they must be able to completely replace the user while, at the same time, being managed by those who developed them and exposed to external attacks whose consequences can even be catastrophic. These characteristics make agents highly suited for profiling and individualized surveillance, as they position themselves between (the data and programs of) a computer and the AI platform with which they must interact.
Agent technology is of particular interest to the Big Tech sector, but also to public and national security and defense sectors, as they lend themselves to preventive control, espionage, and active measures. It is therefore not surprising that the Chinese government and Meta are paying attention to software that, despite its technical immaturity, has already achieved significant adoption among several million users—that is, potential “targets,” at best, of increasingly widespread data-grabbing.
The apparent reasons for the block
The government intervention was formally justified by the need to verify whether Meta’s acquisition was subject to regulations on the export control of technologies considered strategic to the PRC’s interests.
Butterfly Effect, the company that developed the first version of the agent, is Chinese; it was able to operate thanks to the support of giants such as ZhenFund and Tencent Holdings, and the new company controlling the software appears to still maintain ties with China. Hence the intervention by Beijing regulators to verify whether Manus is truly subject solely to Singaporean jurisdiction.
Furthermore, the government’s intervention may also have been motivated by Meta’s statement that, once the acquisition was complete, there would be no Chinese entities in the new corporate structure and operations would be moved elsewhere. Such a decision is fully in line with the U.S. agenda, which aims to retain full control even over non-military technologies of strategic interest—as the cases of TikTok and DJI demonstrate—but this does not mean it is without its problems.
Why the travel ban for top executives?
The Chinese authorities’ intervention was not limited to suspending the acquisition process; it also resulted in a travel ban for the CEO and head of research at Manus AI, which opens up scenarios beyond a simple “penalty” for violating the law.
The first and most immediate interpretation of the incident highlights, as mentioned, China’s desire to keep technologies and services that enable strategic uses within its borders and, likely, to ensure it can punish the guilty parties if violations are confirmed. However, the travel ban also brings to light a recurring element in such cases: the role of the human factor in a sector where the only thing that seems to matter is technology
The Brain Market
If the goal were merely to prevent Manus AI’s intellectual property from falling into foreign hands, simply blocking the acquisition would have been enough to resolve the issue.
This, however, would not have been an effective solution because the true value in a startup lies in the people—that is, in the knowledge they possess and the skills they have. In other words, the value of Manus AI is not solely in the computer code it has developed and the user base it has built, but in the people who conceived it and who, therefore, would be able to replicate the work even if they had to start from scratch.
In other words, Meta would not be buying software but brains, and that is precisely what China cannot allow, underscoring its determination not to lose ground in the race for control over artificial intelligence and its applications
The Geopolitical Stalemate
It is clear that the temporary block imposed on Meta implies the start of negotiations between the U.S. Big Tech firm and the government, but these negotiations are already starting from a difficult position, considering that both parties have non-negotiable points.
Meta cannot violate the Trump administration’s formal directives and moral suasion regarding relations with Beijing; China cannot simply give up the intellectual capital represented by the two key figures at Manus. Furthermore, it could not tolerate the embarrassment of failing to retain a company that chose to relocate elsewhere to avoid U.S. trade restrictions
The U.S. push to drive startups out of China
If Manus AI’s individual decision were to prompt other Chinese tech companies to follow suit, the negative consequences could be significant because, in addition to what has already been mentioned, it would negatively impact the ability to attract foreign talent and retain domestic talent. This would compromise Beijing’s ability to compete with the West, at least as long as the West remains an attractive market for Eastern tech-driven capitalism
The resilience of the non-Western market
It is also true, however, that China’s domestic market, the “regional” market, and the markets within Beijing’s sphere of influence are enormous, and that competition among Chinese tech startups is fierce. Consequently, it is by no means certain that a potential brain drain to the West would have significant effects beyond those that are potentially negative in terms of image. Nor is it certain that other startups would want to follow the same path as Manus. After all, for example, Deepseek has chosen to remain in China, while continuing to maintain relationships with the rest of the world, including through the free availability of its models
A game yet to be played
It is certainly too early to say whether the Manus case will cause the effects highlighted or produce other, different ones, but one thing is clear: what is at stake cannot be merely the interest in controlling a technology or the fate of a small company.
So, in this hand of poker, everyone plays with the cards they have in their hand. But if Beijing is dealing, it is hard to imagine that it does not already know where it wants to take the game.