China Orders Meta to Unwind Its $2 Billion Acquisition of Manus

After a four-month national-security review, the National Development and Reform Commission ruled the deal cannot proceed and instructed the parties to withdraw — a rare formal block of a closed US tech acquisition.

China's National Development and Reform Commission said on Monday that it has prohibited foreign investment in Manus and instructed Meta and Manus's founders to withdraw the $2 billion acquisition Meta announced in December. Manus, an agentic-AI startup founded in China and headquartered in Singapore, has been under a national-security probe in Beijing since January, with co-founders reportedly barred from leaving the country during the review. The NDRC's brief Monday statement said the prohibition was issued in accordance with Chinese laws and regulations; Meta said the transaction had complied fully with applicable law.

This is the first time Beijing has formally ordered the unwinding of a closed US-led acquisition of an AI company, and it gives concrete shape to a posture that until now had been signaled mostly through delays. The NDRC's stated rationale — that Manus's underlying agent technology and team should not pass to a US owner — treats AI capability as a controlled export in everything but name. For Meta specifically, it removes a piece Mark Zuckerberg's Superintelligence Labs had been counting on for its agentic stack; Manus's product is one of the few non-US agent systems that has demonstrated consistent multi-step task completion in independent benchmarks.

The ruling extends the pattern visible since Washington tightened chip export controls in 2024: the US restricts what Chinese labs can buy, and Beijing increasingly restricts what Western buyers can acquire. Singapore incorporation, long the standard structure for Chinese-founded AI companies seeking Western capital, no longer reliably insulates a deal from this kind of intervention. Cross-border M&A in AI now carries a regulatory tail risk on both sides of the Pacific that did not exist eighteen months ago, and lawyers are already rewriting representations and warranties for AI deals to reflect it.

For learners: if you work at, found, or invest in an AI company with any cross-border exposure, the geography of your team and IP is now a material question. Which jurisdiction holds the model weights? Where do the founders carry passports? Whose export-control regime applies if the company is sold? These were administrative footnotes a few years ago. The Manus case shows they can now decide whether a $2 billion deal closes at all — and they belong on the list of things you understand about any AI company before you sign anything.