On April 27, China’s National Development and Reform Commission asked U.S. technology giant Meta to withdraw its acquisition of Manus. Manus is an artificial intelligence start-up with a Chinese background and later moved to Singapore. Previously, Meta announced in December last year that it planned to acquire the company for US$2 billion.

China's National Development and Reform Commission said in a brief statement that day that the decision to ban overseas investment in Manus was made in accordance with relevant laws and regulations, and that it had requested the parties involved in the transaction to withdraw the acquisition arrangement.

Meta shares fell 0.2% in premarket trading.

Since the deal was announced, it has continued to attract attention from China and the United States. The report pointed out that U.S. congressmen have previously banned U.S. investors from directly investing in Chinese artificial intelligence companies; at the same time, China is also increasing its efforts to prevent Chinese AI entrepreneurs from moving their businesses overseas.

The Chinese government’s intervention this time has also caused shock in China’s technology entrepreneurship and venture capital circles. Some practitioners originally hoped to use the so-called "Singapore whitewashing" model to avoid scrutiny by China and the United States, that is, moving companies from China to Singapore to reduce regulatory pressure from Beijing and Washington.

Information shows that Manus was originally founded in China and later moved to Singapore. The company mainly develops general-purpose AI agents and launched its first general-purpose AI agent product in March last year, which can perform complex tasks such as market research, programming and data analysis. After the product was released, Manus was once called "the next DeepSeek" by the outside world.

Manus also said that the company achieved $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in December last year, only eight months after the product was launched, saying that this made it the fastest startup in the world to reach this milestone from scratch.

In April last year, Manus completed a $75 million round of financing, led by American venture capital institution Benchmark.

When Meta announced the acquisition late last year, it said it hoped to accelerate AI innovation for enterprise customers and integrate more advanced automation capabilities into its consumer and enterprise product systems, including the Meta AI assistant.

But in January this year, China’s Ministry of Commerce stated that it would conduct an evaluation and investigation into whether the acquisition complied with relevant laws and regulations such as export control, technology import and export, and overseas investment.

A Meta spokesperson told CNBC in March this year that the acquisition was "fully compliant with applicable laws" and that the company's team expected that the investigation would be "appropriately resolved."

Regarding China’s suspension of Meta’s acquisition of Manus, Chen Xu, chairman of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Senior Officials’ Meeting, said in response to a reporter’s question, “It is important that all parties should act in a spirit of mutual benefit.” However, he also said that he did not know the specific situation of the issue and said that "if such an issue can be properly handled, it will help promote APEC to carry out more substantive discussions."

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