China bars Manus founders from leaving the country
Meta acquisition review turns venture exit into an administrative permission slip, AI dealmaking starts with passports not term sheets
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China bans Manus founders from leaving country after Meta acquisition
euronews.com
China has barred two senior executives at Manus, a Chinese artificial-intelligence startup acquired by Meta, from leaving the country while regulators review the deal, according to the Financial Times and Reuters.
The executives—chief executive Xiao Hong and chief scientist Ji Yichao—were summoned this month to a meeting in Beijing with the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and then told they could not travel abroad, Reuters reports. They can still move within China. Meta announced the acquisition in December, and a Meta spokesperson told Reuters the transaction “complied fully with applicable law” and that the company expects an “appropriate resolution” to the inquiry.
The episode is a reminder of what “ownership” means when the state can turn a corporate transaction into a personal mobility question. For founders and key technical staff, the exit route that normally underpins venture valuations—sell the company, diversify risk, relocate if needed—depends on administrative permission. The leverage is straightforward: if regulators want more information, more conditions, or simply more time, the people who can provide it are kept available.
For foreign buyers, the risk is less that a deal is blocked outright than that it becomes a rolling negotiation. A purchase agreement can secure shares, but it cannot guarantee that the engineers who built the product can travel, speak freely, or steer strategy without constraints. That uncertainty feeds back into price: what looks like an acquisition is, in practice, a bet that regulators will remain comfortable with the technology, the data flows, and the buyer’s long-term posture.
Manus had been marketed as an AI “agent” capable of carrying out tasks with minimal prompting—research, automation and other work that resembles a digital employee, according to Reuters. In China, that places it in the category of strategic capability at a moment when governments are treating AI models, chips and training data as infrastructure rather than software. Reviews that would be routine in other sectors can become national-security exercises, with the founders’ movements treated as part of the asset.
Meta’s acquisition may still be approved. But for now, the company’s most valuable people are not free to board a plane.
According to Reuters, they were told this after a meeting with the NDRC in Beijing.