Meta buys Manus for $2 billion to power high-stakes AI agent race
Autonomous, goal-driven agents are now central to Meta’s strategy going into 2026
· TechRadarNews By Eric Hal Schwartz published 31 December 2025
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- Meta has acquired AI startup Manus in a deal reportedly worth over $2 billion
- Manus builds autonomous AI agents that perform complex tasks like coding and data analysis
- The acquisition accelerates Meta’s pivot from chatbot tools to task-completing AI across its platforms
Meta has acquired AI startup Manus, known for its semi-autonomous AI agents, in a deal reportedly valued at more than $2 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. It's one of the largest AI acquisitions to date. More importantly, it underscores Meta’s plan to shift from creating foundational models like Llama to providing full-service AI agents capable of completing complex tasks for individuals and businesses.
Meta said it plans to make the AI agent platform part of its Meta AI assistant and enterprise offerings. Manus agents can perform complex analytics and long-term research and planning, along with the more usual conversations and image generation. It can also go out to the web and carry out tasks for users, which is why it's named Manus, Latin for hand.
"We will continue to operate and sell the Manus service, as well as integrate it into our products," Meta said in a statement. "Manus is already serving the daily needs of millions of users and businesses worldwide. It launched its first General AI Agent earlier this year and has already served more than 147T tokens and created more than 80M virtual computers. We plan to scale this service to many more businesses."
The reported valuation aligns with where Manus had been headed before Meta intervened. The company had been raising new funds at a $2 billion valuation when Meta approached with an offer. With over $125 million in revenue run rate just eight months after launch, Manus had proven not only its technical capabilities but also its commercial appeal.
But this isn’t just a story of a high-value tech buyout. It marks a directional turn for Meta, one that deepens its commitment to building AI that does more than chat. In fact, Manus was not simply another chatbot; it was one of the first widely available agentic systems able to autonomously perform multi-step, goal-oriented tasks using a blend of reasoning, memory, and tool use. Users could, for instance, hand Manus a research objective or a programming task and watch it coordinate a solution end-to-end. That’s a radically different product category than LLMs trained solely to predict the next word.
AI agent future
Meta wants to build AI that acts. That's also the reason Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI earlier this year. But a working autonomous AI platform is several steps beyond. The company’s pricing model, a mix of free and premium subscriptions, helped it grow rapidly, especially among developers, analysts, and SMEs looking to automate workflows without hiring engineers.
And while Meta has been pouring money into building out its own LLMs, developing effective agentic behavior remains a highly specific engineering and design challenge. Tools like planning, memory, tool-use, and recursive reasoning can’t simply be bolted onto a large model, and Manus has already solved many of these problems.
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