The National Development and Reform Commission made a decision to ban investment in the Manus project acquired by foreign capital in accordance with laws and regulations. On April 27, Beijing time, the Office of the Foreign Investment Security Review Working Mechanism (National Development and Reform Commission) issued the "Security Review Decision on the Foreign Acquisition of the Manus Project", which made an investment ban decision on the foreign acquisition of the Manus project in accordance with laws and regulations, and required the parties involved to cancel the acquisition transaction.
As of press time, Manus has not yet issued a response.
Relevant events began on December 30, 2025, when Manus officially announced that "Manus is about to join Meta." The multi-billion-dollar acquisition price made it the third largest acquisition in Meta's history.
However, the relevant procedures and legal loopholes in the acquisition made it touch the red line of my country's foreign investment security review. On January 8, 2026, Ministry of Commerce spokesperson He Yadong said in response to a question about the review of Meta's acquisition of Manus that the Chinese government has always supported companies in carrying out mutually beneficial and win-win cross-border operations and international technological cooperation in accordance with laws and regulations. It should be noted that enterprises engaging in activities such as foreign investment, technology export, data export, cross-border mergers and acquisitions must comply with Chinese laws and regulations and perform legal procedures. The Ministry of Commerce will work with relevant departments to evaluate and investigate the consistency of this acquisition with relevant laws and regulations such as export control, technology import and export, and foreign investment.
From a legal perspective, Liu Anbang, a partner at DeHeng Law Firm, told China Business News that the key is to see whether Manus’s core AI technology belongs to China’s Catalog of Prohibited and Restricted Export Technologies, especially the control points on “information processing technology” in the revised version in July 2025. The risk in technology export lies in whether the core technologies (such as AI agent components and algorithms) developed in China have not obtained an export license and whether restricted or prohibited technologies are actually handed over to overseas companies (including companies in Singapore or Meta) through personnel transfer, code sharing or business migration. If present, this may be in direct violation of the requirement to require a license to export technology.
Secondly, Manus has used a large amount of data in China when training its products. If such data contains the personal information of Chinese residents, Manus may also have compliance issues with data export when transferring products and technologies to overseas companies.
Xia Bikang, a partner at Yingli Law Firm, told reporters that strictly speaking, Manus may have touched the red line of technology export control when it moved to Singapore, and Meta's huge acquisition is just a "magnifying glass" that puts this hidden risk in the spotlight. The deeper logic behind regulatory actions lies in the correction of policy orientation - in the face of high-profile public opinion, regulators also need to express their attitude, clarify regulatory stance and policy orientation, and avoid tacit incentive effects on possible misconduct.
Xia Bikang said that this review is not only to clarify the compliance of individual cases, but also to further improve the construction and law enforcement standards of relevant compliance systems, block the channels for the loss of core technology assets, and establish the country’s sovereign jurisdiction and guidance over the cross-border flow of high-value science and technology enterprises.