Manus returns to independent operation after Meta unwind
The AI agent startup that Beijing forced out of Meta's hands is going solo again — and the separation comes with a data wipe for some users.
Manus will "soon return to operating as an independent company," the AI agent startup announced Tuesday, formally closing out the $2 billion acquisition that Chinese regulators ordered Meta to unwind in April. The transition comes with an unusual operational cost: to comply with regulatory requirements in specific jurisdictions, data generated by certain users on or after December 29, 2025 — the day Meta closed the deal — will be deleted on August 23–24 (SGT). Affected users can back up until August 23 and restore from August 25; everyone else keeps working normally, and the company stresses the two-day access loss is not the result of any security incident.
The unwind is a landmark of AI nationalism. Beijing barred two Manus co-founders from leaving China during its review, then ordered Meta to dismantle a completed acquisition over investment rules — a first under a new standing framework for unwinding cross-border AI deals. Reports in July put Tencent in talks to become Manus's largest external shareholder at the same $2 billion valuation, with the company said to be approaching $500 million in annual revenue. Whoever ends up holding the shares, the message is unmistakable: agentic AI with Chinese roots stays in Chinese hands, even when the startup has relocated to Singapore.
Unsloth, the open-source fine-tuning library, shipped a native Desktop app for its no-code Studio interface, announced on r/LocalLLaMA. The desktop app is the easiest way to run Unsloth Studio, an open-source browser-based UI for training, running, and exporting open models locally on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It wraps the same kernels that made Unsloth a staple of budget fine-tuning — up to 2x faster training with 70% less VRAM, per the company — and adds one-click export to GGUF and safetensors for llama.cpp, Ollama, and vLLM, plus an API endpoint that lets local Qwen and Gemma models plug into Claude Code and Codex. For the local-AI crowd, the bar just dropped from a pip install and a config file to "download an app."
What to watch: Whether the reported Tencent buy-in closes, and how Manus repositions itself as an independent player in a market where Meta was supposed to be its distribution.
Do you think regulators should be able to force a completed acquisition to unwind? Tell us in the comments.
