China blocks Meta takeover of Manus AI startup

China’s top economic planner has ordered Meta and the AI startup Manus to withdraw a planned roughly $2bn acquisition, according to The Guardian, cutting off a deal Meta announced in December.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said it had cancelled the takeover and prohibited foreign investment in the Manus project. Manus, launched in Beijing and now based in Singapore, builds autonomous “AI agents” designed to carry out multi-step tasks without human intervention—products tech executives have been selling as the next leap in workplace automation.

The immediate consequence is commercial: Meta has been pouring billions into AI and pitched the purchase as a way to bring a leading agent to “billions of people” across its platforms. Blocking the deal forces Meta to keep buying capability the slow way—hiring, partnering, or building in-house—while competitors race to integrate similar tools.

The wider consequence is political: Beijing is treating capital and code as the same kind of border. Bloomberg, cited by The Guardian, reported that Chinese regulators plan to stop tech firms—including leading AI startups—from taking US investment without explicit government approval, and that several private companies have recently been warned off American money. A single transaction becomes a precedent, then a screening regime.

That matters because the AI supply chain is increasingly global by necessity. Startups incorporate in Singapore, raise in the Gulf, recruit in North America, and sell into Europe; Chinese authorities are signalling that a Chinese-origin model team does not become “foreign” just because it has a new mailing address. For founders and investors, the risk is that an exit can be vetoed after months of negotiations, due diligence and product integration work.

The block also lands in the middle of an openly declared rivalry. The Guardian notes that China and the US are the two leading AI powers, and that the best-performing models largely come from developers in those two countries. Washington has framed AI as a strategic race; Beijing is responding by making outbound tech transfer harder to price and harder to execute.

For Europe, the episode reads less like a corporate setback than a reminder of how quickly access can be politicised. A US platform attempting to buy a Beijing-born AI agent is now subject to Chinese industrial policy, regardless of where the headquarters sits.

Meta’s December announcement is still on the record. The NDRC’s instruction is now, too: withdraw the transaction.