Chinese authorities are reviewing Meta’s roughly $2 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence startup Manus to assess whether the transaction breached China’s technology export controls, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing two people familiar with the matter.
Officials at China’s commerce ministry are examining whether the relocation of Manus’s staff and technology to Singapore, followed by its sale to Meta, should have required an export license under Chinese law, the report said.
The review is at an early stage and may not result in a formal investigation, but the licensing requirement could give Beijing leverage over the deal, including, in an extreme scenario, the ability to block the transaction, according to the report.
Meta and Manus did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Meta acquired Manus last month in a deal that valued the Singapore-based company at between $2 billion and $3 billion, a person familiar with the matter previously told Reuters.
Manus attracted widespread attention earlier this year after it released what it described as the world’s first general AI agent — software designed to make decisions and execute tasks autonomously with far less prompting than existing AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek.
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