中国为什么不让Meta买Manus

Speaking of the biggest tech news of the past two days — China not letting Meta buy Manus.

Today is April 27th.

Let's go through it piece by piece.

First, what is Manus?

Manus is the name of a company.

This company makes AI.

You should know AI.

It's a smart computer.

But the AI Manus makes is a bit special.

Special in what way?

The AI it makes is called an "AI agent."

In Chinese, "AI 代理."

What does that mean?

Let me explain.

With ordinary AI, you ask a question, it answers.

You ask one, it answers one.

But an AI agent is different.

You give it one big task.

It goes off and does it, then tells you when it's done.

For example, you say: "I want to go to Tokyo for five days, plan it for me."

A regular AI would give you some suggestions.

But an AI agent goes online by itself.

It looks up flights, looks up hotels.

It compares which is cheaper.

In the end it gives you a complete plan.

Hotel booked, flight chosen, places picked out.

You only have to say one sentence.

And it finishes a big job.

Sounds convenient, right?

That's why many people now love this kind of AI.

What Manus makes is exactly this kind of thing.

And it makes it really well.

They released their first product in March last year.

"Released" means made it available for everyone.

At first, many people didn't know about it.

Later, everyone who used it said it was good.

Slowly, more and more people used it.

By the end of last year, their annual revenue hit one hundred million US dollars.

How much is one hundred million dollars?

About 700 million yuan.

For a small company, that's a huge amount of money.

And they only took eight months to get there.

So everyone calls Manus "the next DeepSeek."

DeepSeek is another Chinese AI company.

It was famous earlier.

You may have heard of it.

So where is Manus from?

This is where it gets a bit complicated.

Manus started in Beijing, China.

The people who built it are Chinese.

The technology was also written by Chinese people.

But later, Manus moved to Singapore.

Singapore is a small country.

South of China, not far away.

Why move to Singapore?

Because it's more convenient there to take foreign money.

In the past year or two, many Chinese companies have done this.

They open a new company in Singapore.

Then they say, "We're a Singapore company, not a Chinese one."

This way, American investors are willing to give them money.

There's a term for this called "Singapore washing."

It means using Singapore as a place to wash off the "China" label.

Manus is a company like that.

They got American money.

There's an American company called Benchmark.

Benchmark is an investment firm.

They gave Manus seventy-five million US dollars.

With that money, Manus grew bigger and bigger.

Then a much bigger thing happened.

Last December, the American company Meta said:

"We're going to buy Manus."

What is Meta?

You've probably used their products.

Facebook is Meta's.

Instagram is Meta's.

WhatsApp is also Meta's.

So Meta is one of the biggest companies in the world.

Meta said:

"We'll give you two billion dollars to sell Manus to us."

Some say it was 2.5 billion.

No matter the exact number, it's a huge amount of money.

Why did Meta want to buy Manus?

Because Meta also wants to build AI agents.

Meta thought: if we buy Manus, we'll have the technology.

Then we can put it on Facebook, on Instagram.

Let all our users use it.

It sounded like a good deal.

But the Chinese government wasn't happy.

Why wasn't it happy?

Because the Chinese government felt:

"Even though Manus moved to Singapore, the technology is still Chinese."

"This technology cannot be given to America."

This January, China started investigating it.

"Investigating" means asking questions to find out what's going on.

They looked into it for several months.

Today, they officially said:

"No."

This deal cannot go through.

"Meta cannot buy, Manus cannot sell."

This decision by China is very important.

Why?

Because it's a signal.

A "signal" means telling everyone something.

What the Chinese government is saying is:

"From now on, Chinese companies cannot just sell themselves to America."

"If you want to sell, you ask me first."

"If I say yes, then yes."

"If I say no, then no."

So this isn't just about Manus.

It's something every Chinese AI company has to face.

What about Meta?

Meta spent so much time, so much money.

Now they can't buy. What now?

Meta said:

"What we did was all right."

"We want to talk again."

But China probably won't change its mind.

So that two billion may not happen.

Meta's plan to do AI also needs to be rethought.

Finally, let's think about what this means.

What does this thing tell us?

First, AI isn't just technology.

AI is also a matter between countries.

China wants to build its own AI.

America also wants to build its own AI.

Neither country wants the other to be stronger.

Second, business isn't just business.

Sometimes the government has to step in.

Especially big deals, important technology.

Third, ordinary people aren't directly involved.

But these things affect us in the end.

The AI we use may be tied to things like this.

Today's story ends here.

April 27th — China stops Meta from buying Manus.

One of the biggest things in tech this year.

We'll talk again later.