Top AI Product

On August 11 Manus confirmed it will “soon resume operations as an independent company.” China’s NDRC ordered the unwind in April, citing tech-export and foreign-investment violations; co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao were summoned to Beijing in March and barred from leaving during the review. Meta had only closed the deal on December 29, 2025. A startup swallowed by a hyperscaler and then spat back out is close to unheard of in AI.

What Manus actually is

A general-purpose AI agent, not a chatbot. Give it a goal — research a market, clean a dataset, produce a deck — and it spins up a cloud VM with a browser and shell, runs the multi-step job unattended, and hands back finished files. The autonomous demo video is what made it 2025’s most viral agent launch.

API, pricing, and the catch

Web product plus API access, so the agent can run as a background worker inside internal ops. Free tier: 300 daily refreshing credits, one concurrent task on Manus 1.6 Lite. Pro is $20–$200/month, Team $20/seat. Credits track compute — a lookup costs 10–20, a full research report 200–500.

The separation isn’t clean. Data created after December 29, 2025 gets deleted August 23–24, so users have to back it up first. Independence also puts model supply and pricing back in Manus’s hands — worth watching for anyone building on it.

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