Meta acquires Manus: Is this the end of chatbots and the rise of autonomous AI agents?

Meta acquires Manus to power autonomous AI agents in Meta AI ecosystem. Acquiring Manus, a Singapore-based startup that creates autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks in real-world situations is a huge step in artificial intelligence by Meta Platforms. The Meta Manus acquisition marks a major shift toward autonomous AI agents, as Meta plans to integrate Manus technology into Meta AI and push deeper into the fast-growing agentic AI space.The acquisition was declared on 29 December 2025, by which Meta plans to incorporate the technology of Manus in its own AI offerings, such as Meta AI, but leave Manus to operate out of Singapore.

Why Meta’s Manus acquisition is critical for Meta AI’s future?

Meta has been actively growing its artificial intelligence development, and the acquisition of Manus is currently one of the most critical in its history. With this deal, Meta is accelerating its Meta AI agents roadmap, moving beyond chat-based assistants to AI systems that can complete real-world tasks independently. Although Meta did not officially announce the specific terms of the financials, the deal might be valued at over 2 billion dollars, which would potentially be the third-largest AI acquisition in the company history behind WhatsApp and Scale AI. The overall AI technology offered by Manus would be consistent with the long-term vision of Meta to create agents who do work as opposed to merely chatting.

What Manus actually does

Manus AI agents are designed as AI that performs tasks, handling market research, coding, debugging, and data analysis without step-by-step human input. Manus is most famed at developing artificial intelligent agents capable of planning, executing and completing complex tasks independently, e.g. market research, code writing and code debugging, data analysis, etc., without human step-by-step instruction. It initially introduced its own flagship autonomous AI agent in March 2025 and soon attracted attention over its capacity to see beyond the simple question-answer bots.

This is one of the major contrasts of the traditional AI chatbots: Manus agents do not only reply, but act towards the objectives, which makes them look more of a digital employee than a chat assistant. Unlike traditional chatbots, Manus functions like an AI digital employee, making it highly attractive for businesses looking to deploy enterprise AI agents at scale.

Fast growth and revenue milestones

One of the largest reasons why Meta did target Manus was its commercial momentum. The rapid rise of Manus highlights growing autonomous AI demand in the global agentic AI market, especially among enterprises willing to pay for productivity-focused AI tools. The startup said that it achieved up to 100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) within eight months, which is one of the shortest timeframes to achieve this goal. It was also reporting a revenue run rate of more than 125 million at the end of 2025. These numbers indicate that the autonomous AI has a high demand but also that there is a desire of businesses and individuals to pay to have the scale of agent tools instead of a one-on-one chat interface.

Massive technical footprint

Manus has also claimed impressive technical throughput: since launch it has handled over 147 trillions of tokens and has enabled more than 80 million virtual computers to be created using its platform. These virtual computers are self-contained AI workflow and task execution environments that Manus can execute various jobs, like research chains or automation tasks.

It is under the acquisition that the Manus group with the founder and CEO Xiao Hong are joining the AI organisation of Meta. Meta will use the agent technology of Manus in its products - this could allow it to add proactive features, such as automatic research within news feeds, business intelligence generation, and tool-driven workflows to WhatsApp, Facebook, and more. Manus will not discontinue with his current subscriptions and services. The strategic decision will put Meta directly in competition with its competitors such as OpenAI and Google in the upcoming area of agentic AI - systems capable of performing chained and multi-step tasks with minimal supervision by its users.

How Manus compares with other AI tools

Despite the existence of more specific independent benchmarks, Manus has publicly characterised its autonomous agents as able to execute more general tasks than most research-oriented AI models. This acquisition also sharpens the Meta AI vs OpenAI and Meta AI vs Google rivalry, as all three race to dominate the next phase of autonomous, action-driven AI. Unlike the OpenAI research tools, which are best at synthesising or summarising information and data, Manus is designed to integrate planning, action, and execution in a single workflow, in other words, is not just an AI that thinks but one that acts.

A shift toward AI that works

The purchase of Manus by Meta is a turning point to AI which is able to accomplish tasks independently instead of merely being an aid to users in the form of responses. By combining its scale with Manus technology, Meta is redefining the Meta AI future, where autonomous AI agents become everyday digital workers across apps used by billions. With the execution capabilities of Manus coupled with the AI infrastructure of its own, Meta has the potential to transform intelligent agents into a standard component of the day-to-day apps to assist in doing everything, including research to code, automation, and smart business insights. It is not merely an improvement to the Meta AI line of products, but it can be a move in a direction of AI becoming a digital employee in the entire industry of billions of users the world over.