--- title: Manus is separating from Meta and deleting some user... description: Manus, the AI agent platform acquired by Meta in December 2025 for ~$2 billion, is unwinding the deal after China's National Development and Reform Commission... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/manus-is-separating-from-meta-and-deleting-some-user-data-here-s-what-you-need-to-know-hktetxoz7 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Manus is separating from Meta and deleting some user data — here's what you need to know | daily.dev og:description: Manus, the AI agent platform acquired by Meta in December 2025 for ~$2 billion, is unwinding the deal after China's National Development and Reform Commission... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/manus-is-separating-from-meta-and-deleting-some-user-data-here-s-what-you-need-to-know-hktetxoz7 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/hKTETXoz7.png og:image:alt: Manus is separating from Meta and deleting some user data — here's what you need to know 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. # Manus is separating from Meta and deleting some user data — here's what you need to know **[Collections](https://daily.dev/sources/collections)** · 3 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Manus, the AI agent platform acquired by Meta in December 2025 for ~$2 billion, is unwinding the deal after China's National Development and Reform Commission ordered the transaction withdrawn. As part of the separation, Manus will delete data created by certain users on or after December 29, 2025. The deletion is scheduled for August 23–24, 2026 (SGT), and affected users must back up their data before 7:59 a.m. SGT on August 23 using Manus's backup tool. Account restoration begins August 25 (SGT). Manus won't charge affected users during the backup window and will offer welcome-back bonuses. The situation highlights the risk of regulatory intervention forcing ownership changes and data deletion with limited notice for those building workflows on AI agent platforms. ## Content Manus, the Chinese AI agent startup that Meta bought for roughly $2 billion back in December 2025, is now being forced apart from its new owner. China's National Development and Reform Commission ordered the deal withdrawn, blocking foreign ownership of the company outright. So Manus is going independent again, whether anyone planned for that or not. Here's the part that actually matters if you're a user: unwinding an acquisition isn't just a paperwork exercise. To comply with the regulatory order, Manus has to delete data generated by certain users on or after December 29, 2025 — the date Meta's acquisition closed. If you're one of the affected users, you have a hard deadline to back things up before that data disappears. **The deadlines:** - Back up your data before 7:59 a.m. SGT on August 23, 2026 (that's 7:59 p.m. EDT on August 22) - Deletion happens August 23–24 (SGT) - Restoration opens August 25 Manus says it won't charge affected users during the backup window and is offering welcome-back bonuses once data is restored. If you weren't affected by the December 29 cutoff, you don't need to do anything. I keep coming back to how weirdly specific this whole situation is. A government blocked a $2 billion acquisition after the fact, and now a company has to surgically delete months of user data to comply — but only some users' data, only from a certain date, on a tight international deadline measured in Singapore time. It's the kind of thing that sounds like a compliance footnote until you realize it's actually about people's saved agent workflows, projects, and history just vanishing if they don't act in time.zzz This fits a pattern with Chinese regulators lately: they'll block foreign ownership of homegrown AI companies while still letting open-weight AI models flow out to the rest of the world freely. Restricting control, not restricting the technology itself. Meta, for its part, hasn't said whether it plans to replace whatever Manus gave it — it already has its own agent product, Muse Code, running separately. But the bigger lesson here isn't really about Manus or Meta specifically. It's about what happens when you build real workflows on top of an AI agent platform you don't control. Ownership can change. Regulators can intervene. And when that happens, your data's fate isn't really up to you — it's up to whatever compliance requirements come down from wherever the new (or old) owner answers to. If you're relying on one of these platforms for anything that matters, it's worth knowing ahead of time what your export options actually look like, because you might not get much warning before you need them. ## Questions this post answers ### When will Manus delete user data after the Meta separation and what is the backup deadline? Manus will delete affected user data on August 23–24, 2026 (SGT). Affected users must back up their data before 7:59 a.m. SGT on August 23 (equivalent to 7:59 p.m. EDT on August 22) using Manus's backup tool. Account restoration begins August 25 (SGT) / August 24 (EDT). Manus will not charge affected users during the backup window and will offer welcome-back bonuses after restoration. _Developers relying on AI agent platforms track ownership and data-risk news like this on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 81 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-08-12). **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) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/manus-is-separating-from-meta-and-deleting-some-user-data-here-s-what-you-need-to-know-hktetxoz7) ```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":"Manus is separating from Meta and deleting some user data — here's what you need to know","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/manus-is-separating-from-meta-and-deleting-some-user-data-here-s-what-you-need-to-know-hktetxoz7","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/manus-is-separating-from-meta-and-deleting-some-user-data-here-s-what-you-need-to-know-hktetxoz7"},"datePublished":"2026-08-11T21:52:38.467Z","dateModified":"2026-08-12T11:56:00.424Z","description":"Manus, the AI agent platform acquired by Meta in December 2025 for ~$2 billion, is unwinding the deal after China's National Development and Reform Commission...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/65c4151acd9d5b836965ea1d91f70b2d?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/65c4151acd9d5b836965ea1d91f70b2d?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Collections","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Collections","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--fk_6ycEi--/f_auto,q_auto/v1780996001/logos/collections?_a=BAMAMiWQ0","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/collections"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/manus-is-separating-from-meta-and-deleting-some-user-data-here-s-what-you-need-to-know-hktetxoz7","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":1},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"ai-agents","timeRequired":"PT3M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Collections","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/collections"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Manus is separating from Meta and deleting some user data — here's what you need to know"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/manus-is-separating-from-meta-and-deleting-some-user-data-here-s-what-you-need-to-know-hktetxoz7#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"When will Manus delete user data after the Meta separation and what is the backup deadline?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Manus will delete affected user data on August 23–24, 2026 (SGT). Affected users must back up their data before 7:59 a.m. SGT on August 23 (equivalent to 7:59 p.m. EDT on August 22) using Manus's backup tool. Account restoration begins August 25 (SGT) / August 24 (EDT). Manus will not charge affected users during the backup window and will offer welcome-back bonuses after restoration. Developers relying on AI agent platforms track ownership and data-risk news like this on daily.dev."}}]} ```