Manus
A general purpose AI agent service that became well known in 2025 for completing multi-step tasks on its own.
Manus arrived in early 2025 as one of the first products to make the idea of a general AI agent feel real to ordinary users. You give it a goal rather than a prompt, and it goes off and works: browsing, writing files, running code, coming back with something finished. That framing caught on quickly and the service grew to millions of users.
Its ownership has been anything but settled. Meta acquired the company in December 2025, Chinese regulators blocked the roughly two billion dollar deal in April 2026 after it had already closed, and Manus is now unwinding the acquisition and returning to independence. The separation comes with real consequences for users, including a deletion of some account data created during the Meta period.