Meta’s First Post-Acquisition Move: Manus My Computer Puts an AI Agent on Your Desktop

Two months after Meta closed its $2 billion acquisition of Manus, the newly merged team just shipped its first major product. Manus My Computer, released March 16 and immediately crowned Product Hunt’s #1 product on March 17 with 299 upvotes, takes the AI agent out of the browser tab and plants it directly on your local machine. It can read your files, run terminal commands, launch applications, and even tap into your GPU for model training — all from a desktop app available on macOS and Windows.

This isn’t just a feature update. It’s a statement about where Meta thinks the AI agent race is heading: away from the cloud and onto your hard drive.

From Cloud-Only to Local-First: What Changed

Manus launched in March 2025 as a cloud-first AI agent. You’d give it tasks — market research, coding, data analysis — and it would spin up virtual machines in the cloud to get things done. The approach worked well enough to generate over $100 million in annualized revenue within eight months and process more than 147 trillion tokens across 80 million virtual computers. By December 2025, Meta came knocking with a $2 billion check, and the 100-person Manus team joined the company, with CEO Xiao Hong (known as Red) reporting directly to Meta COO Javier Olivan.

But cloud-only has obvious limitations. You can’t organize photos sitting on your desktop. You can’t batch-rename invoices stored in a local folder. You can’t use your idle RTX 4090 to fine-tune a model. My Computer fills that gap by giving Manus direct access to your terminal, file system, and locally installed applications.

The setup is straightforward: download the Manus Desktop app, sign in, and authorize which local folders the agent can access. From there, you can ask Manus to do things like sort thousands of unsorted photos by content, rename hundreds of invoices automatically, build a complete Swift app using Xcode in about 20 minutes, or run ML model training on your local GPU while you sleep.

The Permission System: Every Command Needs a Green Light

Here’s where My Computer gets interesting from a trust perspective. Every terminal command Manus wants to execute requires your explicit approval before it runs. No exceptions. You see the exact command, and you choose:

Allow Once — review each operation individually
Always Allow — streamline workflows for commands you trust

The official messaging is clear: “You are the commander; Manus is the executor.” It’s a deliberate design choice that acknowledges a fundamental tension in desktop AI agents. Giving an AI access to your local machine is powerful, but it’s also inherently risky. One bad rm -rf and your project directory is gone.

This approval-first approach is more conservative than some competitors. Anthropic’s Claude CoWork, for example, also offers permission controls but leans more toward autonomous execution in certain modes. Whether Manus’s friction-heavy model is a feature or a limitation depends on your risk tolerance — and how much you trust the agent not to hallucinate a destructive command.

How Manus My Computer Stacks Up Against the Competition

The desktop AI agent category has gotten crowded fast. Here’s how the key players compare:

Manus My Computer operates through terminal commands, giving it deep system-level access. It handles file management, app control, and GPU utilization. The command-approval system adds a safety layer but slows down execution. Available on macOS and Windows. Requires a Manus subscription (free tier with 1,000 starter credits; Pro plans from $20/month to $200/month depending on usage).

Anthropic’s Claude CoWork uses computer vision to see and interact with your entire desktop environment, clicking buttons and navigating UIs like a human would. It scored state-of-the-art results on the OSWorld benchmark for desktop task completion. The visual approach means it can work with any application, not just terminal-based workflows, but it can be slower and less precise than direct command execution.

OpenAI’s Operator remains focused on web-based tasks — filling forms, clicking through websites, managing browser workflows. It doesn’t touch your local files or applications, which makes it less relevant for the use cases My Computer targets but more polished for web automation.

Perplexity Computer takes a different angle entirely, orchestrating 19 specialized AI models (including Claude, Gemini, and Grok) and connecting to over 400 apps. It’s more of a cloud-based project manager than a local system controller.

The gap Manus is targeting is clear: local machine control with explicit safety guardrails. Whether that’s enough to differentiate in a market where Anthropic and others are moving fast remains the open question.

The Bigger Picture: Why Meta Cares About Desktop Agents

Meta didn’t spend $2 billion on Manus just for a file organizer. The acquisition fits into a broader strategy of building AI that does things rather than just talks about them. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly emphasized agents as the next major platform shift, and Manus’s track record — state-of-the-art scores on the GAIA benchmark across all three difficulty levels, beating both OpenAI Deep Research and previous SOTA — gives Meta a credible entry point.

My Computer is also a data play. Cloud-based agents operate in sandboxed environments with limited context about how people actually use their computers. A desktop agent sees your real workflow: which apps you use, how your files are organized, what tools you rely on. That kind of behavioral data is enormously valuable for training better AI systems — though Manus hasn’t explicitly addressed how (or whether) local interaction data feeds back into model improvement.

The hybrid model is worth noting too. My Computer doesn’t replace Manus’s cloud capabilities — it extends them. The agent can still access cloud services like Gmail and Google Calendar while simultaneously working with local resources. Imagine telling Manus to find a file on your desktop, compress it, and email it to a client, all in one workflow. That cloud-plus-local integration is something none of the pure-cloud competitors can match yet.

What Users Are Actually Saying

Community reception to Manus overall has been split. On the positive side, developers praise its ability to go from complex idea to functional MVP quickly. One Reddit user noted it provides “a good template to finish in about 20 minutes” for full-stack app development.

On the negative side, reliability remains a persistent complaint. Users regularly hit “high service load” errors, and the credit-based pricing model makes costs unpredictable — complex tasks can burn 500 to 900 credits each, with no way to estimate cost upfront. Whether My Computer’s local execution helps alleviate server-side load issues remains to be seen, since the agent’s reasoning still happens in the cloud even when execution is local.

The Product Hunt response to My Computer specifically has been strong: 299 upvotes and the #1 spot on launch day, with Techmeme picking it up as a trending tech story the same day. Multiple outlets including GIGAZINE, Medium, and TestingCatalog covered the launch simultaneously.

FAQ

Is Manus My Computer free to use?
Manus offers a free tier with 1,000 starter credits and 300 credits refreshed daily. Paid Pro plans start at $20/month (4,000 credits), with a $40/month option (8,000 credits) and a $200/month Extended plan (40,000 credits). Annual billing saves about 17%. The My Computer feature is available across all tiers, but credit consumption for complex local tasks can add up quickly.

How does Manus My Computer compare to Claude CoWork?
Manus My Computer works primarily through terminal commands and direct file system access, while Claude CoWork uses computer vision to visually interact with your desktop like a human user. Manus is faster for command-line and file operations; CoWork is more versatile for GUI-based tasks. Both require user permissions, but Manus’s approval system is more granular.

What operating systems does Manus My Computer support?
macOS and Windows are both supported as of the March 16 launch. There’s no Linux version announced yet.

Is it safe to give Manus access to my local files?
Every terminal command requires explicit user approval before execution. You can authorize specific folders rather than your entire file system. The “Allow Once” mode lets you review each operation individually. That said, any tool with terminal access carries inherent risk — always review commands carefully, especially those involving file deletion or system modifications.

Can Manus My Computer work offline?
No. While execution happens on your local machine, the AI reasoning and planning still occur in the cloud. You need an active internet connection and a Manus account to use My Computer.

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