The unwound acquisition

On April 27, 2026, China's economic-planning agency issued a one-sentence order, with no explanation, requiring Meta to unwind its roughly $2.5 billion acquisition of Manus, the Chinese-founded maker of a general-purpose AI agent. The deal had closed on December 29. By March, about a hundred Manus staff had moved into Meta's Singapore offices and the product's code and model weights had been merged into Meta's stack. Investors had been paid.

By late May the founders were reportedly trying to raise about $1 billion to buy the company back from Meta — the only way to undo a sale whose code was already merged.

What makes this a first is the timing. Governments block mergers before they close all the time, and the United States has forced sales of already-owned assets — ByteDance's TikTok, Grindr. But per the law firm O'Melveny, no consummated deal had ever been ordered undone under China's 2021 foreign-investment security framework. You cannot un-merge model weights or un-pay an investor who has already cashed out. The founders had relocated Manus's headquarters from China to Singapore in mid-2025 precisely to sell into a US company without Beijing's reach; the ruling treats that move as irrelevant, asserting that Chinese-origin AI talent and IP remain a national asset that travels with the founders, not the company's address.

Two founders learned this directly: summoned to Beijing in March and barred from leaving the mainland. The signal lands on every Chinese AI startup that redomiciled offshore hoping to be acquired by an American firm — the escape hatch they were counting on may not exist.