Meta has acquired yet another AI start-up as part of its expanded mission towards AI “superintelligence,” with AI chatbot company Manus joining the Meta flock.
Manus, which says that it builds “general AI agents as the action engine for life,” and describes its mission as “extending human reach by giving everyone the code to leverage their life,” has worked to create a range of bot generation tools that can improve interactive sequencing in a range of ways.
Which Meta clearly sees value in, potentially as a means to refine its Meta AI chatbot, or some other underlying advancement that will benefit from Manus’ projects.
As explained by Meta:
“Manus has built one of the leading autonomous general-purpose agents that can independently execute complex tasks like market research, coding, and data analysis. We will continue to operate and sell the Manus service, as well as integrate it into our products.”
So it’s planning to operate both under the Meta and Manus brand, though presumably, the Manus skin will eventually be transferred to a Meta shell instead, as it looks to expand its own AI business.
Though it may pace itself on the integration, with Meta also noting that Manus is already serving millions of users worldwide.
“It launched its first General AI Agent earlier this year and has already served more than 147T tokens and created more than 80M virtual computers. We plan to scale this service to many more businesses.”
So it’s seemingly an expansion of Meta’s business AI outreach, which could be a key way that Meta will eventually be able to make money from its increasingly costly AI services.
Because the more data that Meta has to process, the more it costs to run its AI servers, and if it can’t start making real money back from that, real fast, the outgoings start to look pretty bleak. And with ChatGPT already establishing itself as the main engine for consumer AI (something that annoys Zuck and Co. no end), maybe Manus will provide a pathway into business AI integration, though whether businesses want to trust Meta with their data is another consideration.
Perhaps, then, the Manus branding will endure for a while longer.
It’s the latest in Meta’s recent spate of AI deals as it looks to build out its capacity, and dominate the AI race, both through acquisition and resource gathering.
In July last year, Meta acquired PlayAI, which had been developing AI voice models before the acquisition, while in August, Meta announced a new partnership with Midjourney, which will see Meta’s AI tools benefit from Midjourney’s image and video generation knowledge. Last month, Meta also acquired AI startup Limitless, whose main product is an AI-powered pendant that’s able to record everyday conversations, and generate summaries, while it’s also signed a new slate of data deals with major news providers that will provide more content to fuel real-time queries within Meta’s AI chatbot.
This is all part of Meta’s broader push to dominate the AI race, both now and into the future, by eliminating the competition in the current phase, and developing actual AI (or AGI as we’ve come to know it) with its larger superintelligence project.
Though shrewd acquisition, Meta may be able to win out, and with the U.S. government looking to take a more hands-off approach to AI regulation, in order to hasten development, Meta seems to be taking advantage of the reduced scrutiny to buy up potential competitors while it can.
Will that end up working in Meta’s favor?
It’s impossible to know without insight into Meta’s plans, but it does seem like Meta’s going to be making more moves into AI products in 2026.
