Meta buys Manus AI for $2.5bn to supercharge agentic assistants
TL;DR
Meta has acquired Singapore‑based agentic AI startup Manus in a deal reported to be worth more than $2 billion, with some estimates around $2.5 billion including retention packages. Manus will continue operating its subscription AI agent service while its team and technology are integrated into Meta’s broader ‘personal superintelligence’ strategy.
About this summary
This article aggregates reporting from 7 news sources. The TL;DR is AI-generated from original reporting. Race to AGI's analysis provides editorial context on implications for AGI development.
Race to AGI Analysis
By buying Manus, Meta is effectively buying an execution layer for its Llama models and its broader ‘personal superintelligence’ vision. Manus sits at the frontier of agentic AI: systems that can browse, plan and act across the web rather than just chat. Folding a team that has already shipped general‑purpose agents with millions of users into Meta’s stack gives Zuckerberg a fast‑track alternative to building agents entirely in‑house, and it does so at a moment when enterprise‑grade AI agents are starting to look like the next major platform after chatbots.([indianexpress.com](https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/artificial-intelligence/why-meta-acquired-manus-what-it-means-personal-superintelligence-10446193/))
This also marks a subtle but important shift in Meta’s competitive posture. Instead of just open‑sourcing models and hoping the ecosystem does the rest, Meta is now vertically integrating layers of the agent stack in the same way it once integrated Instagram and WhatsApp. That puts pressure on Salesforce, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, all of whom are racing to define the default agent that actually performs work. If Manus’ technology scales inside Meta’s social, messaging and business products, it could rapidly become one of the largest deployment surfaces for autonomous agents on the planet.
