Tencent is in talks to become the largest shareholder in Manus, the autonomous-agent startup Meta agreed to buy for roughly $2 billion late last year, after Chinese regulators ordered Meta to unwind the deal on national-security grounds, according to Reuters and Bloomberg, both citing the Financial Times.

From Meta acquisition to forced unwind

Meta announced its purchase of Manus in December 2025 to bolster its agentic AI push, but Chinese regulators intervened in April 2026, citing concerns over foreign ownership of an AI company with roots in China even though Manus is now headquartered in Singapore. Since the order, Meta has executed an operational split from Manus and cut off data sharing between the two companies, unwinding a deal that had been one of the highest-profile cross-border acquisitions in the agentic AI space.

The Tencent-led buyback

Tencent, together with Manus's earlier backers ZhenFund and HSG, is now negotiating to repurchase the company at the same roughly $2 billion valuation Meta had agreed to pay, with the consortium reportedly seeking to raise around $1 billion to fund the deal. U.S. investor Benchmark, an earlier Manus backer, is not expected to participate. Despite emerging as the single largest shareholder, Tencent is expected to remain a minority owner overall, spreading equity across the consortium so no one investor controls a company whose Chinese origins already proved politically sensitive once.

Why it matters

The reversal is one of the starkest examples yet of Beijing asserting control over cross-border AI deals, and it leaves Meta without the autonomous-agent capability it had been counting on to catch up to OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic in the race to ship agents that can independently complete multistep tasks. For Manus, which built its reputation on general-purpose task automation, the episode underscores how geopolitics now shapes ownership of AI-agent IP as directly as product capability does — any Western acquirer of a Chinese-founded agent startup faces the same regulatory exposure that unwound the Meta deal.