--- title: A Note to Our Users | daily.dev description: Manus, the AI agent platform, is separating from Meta and returning to independent operations. As part of this transition and to comply with regulatory... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/a-note-to-our-users-fkeagv5tz twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: A Note to Our Users | daily.dev og:description: Manus, the AI agent platform, is separating from Meta and returning to independent operations. As part of this transition and to comply with regulatory... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/a-note-to-our-users-fkeagv5tz og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/FKeAgv5Tz.png og:image:alt: A Note to Our Users og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # A Note to Our Users **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 5 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Manus, the AI agent platform, is separating from Meta and returning to independent operations. As part of this transition and to comply with regulatory requirements, data generated by certain users on or after December 29, 2025 (when Meta acquired Manus) will be deleted between August 23–24, 2026 (SGT). Affected users must back up their data before 7:59 a.m. SGT on August 23 using the provided backup tool, and can restore it starting August 25. Unaffected users need take no action. Manus will not charge affected users during the backup period and will offer welcome-back bonuses upon data restoration. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Why is Manus deleting some users' data in August 2026? Manus is separating from Meta following Meta's December 29, 2025 acquisition and must comply with regulatory requirements in specific jurisdictions. Data generated by certain users on or after that acquisition date will be deleted between August 23 and August 24, 2026 (SGT), affecting only specific users rather than the entire user base. The company states this is unrelated to any security breach. _daily.dev helps developers relying on Manus track platform changes that affect their data and workflows._ ### How do I back up my Manus account data before the August 2026 deletion? Affected Manus users can use the backup tool at manus.im/backup until 7:59 a.m. SGT on August 23, 2026, after which data is deleted through August 24. The tool supports multiple backups, so users who generate new task data after an initial backup should back up again to capture the latest data before the cutoff. _developers depending on Manus for agent workflows can follow migration steps like these via daily.dev._ ### When can affected Manus users restore their data and regain access after the August 2026 outage? Affected users regain access starting 8:00 a.m. SGT on August 25, 2026, when the data restoration portal opens, after roughly two days without account access from August 23 through August 24. Users will not be charged during the backup period from August 11 through August 23 and will receive welcome-back bonuses after restoring their data. _daily.dev keeps builders on Manus and similar AI agent tools informed about service disruptions like this._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 81 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-09-13). **TL;DR:** The community is largely skeptical of Manus, viewing it as a short-lived hype cycle that was overtaken by better-integrated alternatives; the more heated discussion is actually a tangent about Claude Cowork/ChatGPT Work adoption, while the regulatory backstory — China blocking Meta's acquisition — draws significant interest. **Sentiment:** 20% positive · 40% mixed · 40% skeptical **The case for** - Some users find Manus genuinely useful for deep research, non-coding agentic tasks, and cron-job automation. - A few active users praise its built-in harness (browser use, database, parallelization) as well-executed. - Its deep research and PDF generation pipeline were noted as standout features before model improvements made them less differentiated. **The pushback** - Manus is widely seen as expensive and unpredictable due to its token/credit system, with one user reporting a $40 charge for a single task. - The consensus is that its hype cycle was extremely short and that underlying model improvements have eroded its unique value proposition. - Many commenters question whether its $2B acquisition valuation was ever justified given limited real-world adoption. - Speed of task completion was criticized as slow due to heavy reliance on large, expensive backend models. **By community** - hackernews (skeptical): Commenters broadly view Manus as a flash-in-the-pan product whose niche has been absorbed by first-party AI tools, with the more animated debate centering on China's regulatory blocking of the Meta acquisition and a side-thread about Claude Cowork adoption. **Hottest debate:** Whether AI tools like Claude Cowork are genuinely transformative for knowledge workers or are only praised by people too inexperienced to recognize their errors. **Open questions** - Which specific regulatory jurisdictions are requiring the data deletion, and does this affect users outside China? - Will the founders remain detained by Chinese authorities after the unwinding process is complete? - Was there a break-up fee in the Meta–Manus acquisition agreement? - What happens to Manus's product roadmap and competitive positioning now that it is independent again? **Highlights** > Manus did a lot of harness work to make up for gaps in Opus 4.5 tier models. I tried it for a time - they had a great deep research/PDF generation pipeline, parallelization, etc. The bitter lesson has now come for them: the latest models no longer have these gaps and the entire premise of having a unique product focus on this area is no longer relevant. Even Ant/OAI have let their "Deep Research" capabilities fall by the wayside, you can largely get the same result by asking for subagents or simply "keep going" style prompting. > — [extr on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49264880) > Almost certainly Chinese national-security and technology-transfer restrictions around strategic AI tech. China’s NDRC formally prohibited the acquisition and ordered the transaction unwound. > — [kristianc on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49260070) > This has to be one of the most flash in the pan, 5 minutes of fame company in a long time It's crazy how short it's hype cycle lasted > — [nylonstrung on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49263293) > Claude CoWork absolutely dominates - I use it continuously now when connecting to mail, calendar, jira, google docs - any type of knowledge work. Almost everyone I know (at work) who does "Knowledge work" type stuff (as opposed to coding) uses it as their primary pane-of-glass now. I have 15+ years of top 1 percentile knowledge using awk to process complex unstructured documents - and I don't even bother anymore - just dump the dataset into CoWork and ask it to do the analysis, cross check its work. I did it last night during a call for a reasonably complex 10,000 node cluster with all sorts of jobs/allocations/memory constraints. I didn't even attempt to throw together a quick awk script (which would have taken me 7-8 minutes - it was a beast) - just did a nomad-job-inspect of a couple hundred jobs, and dumped all the data at CoWork (real time, while talking on the zoom) and said, "Get me the Memory/CPU requirements based on job/datacenter/SKU constraints and give me a summary Table". Any normal person would have take 3-4 hours, minimum - futzing with google sheets and such (lots of task/taskgroup independent counts). Even I would have taken a minimum of 10 minutes. Cowork had it for me in under 30 seconds - I didn't even have to really look away from the zoom. I haven't use the Atlassian Jira interface to manage my sprints/issues in 6+ weeks. All that cognitive drain is gone - I just ask CoWork to update the sprints, link issues to change-notices, comment and change status, set epics, etc... Zero need to find the damn field in Jira. CoWork is legit. > — [ghshephard on hackernews · 6 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49261466) > As a counterpoint, the Accounting and Finance departments where I work are banned from using Cowork because it performed abysmally during a trial run. To put things in perspective, humans with a 25% lower error rate than Cowork are pip'd and usually let go. As with junior programmers and their love of vibe coding, I've found that anyone who thinks that AI tooling right now is "amazing" lacks the skills, knowledge, and/or experience to know that it really isn't. > — [gamblor956 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49262956) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49258764) · 153 points · 81 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Meta cuts Manus off from data systems, begins unwinding deal](https://daily.dev/posts/meta-cuts-manus-off-from-data-systems-begins-unwinding-deal-4w4vf3rgn) · The Next Web · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#data-privacy](https://daily.dev/tags/data-privacy) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/a-note-to-our-users-fkeagv5tz) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"A Note to Our Users","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/a-note-to-our-users-fkeagv5tz","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/a-note-to-our-users-fkeagv5tz"},"datePublished":"2026-08-11T16:27:50.803Z","dateModified":"2026-09-13T20:08:36.016Z","description":"Manus, the AI agent platform, is separating from Meta and returning to independent operations. 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