Mark Zuckerberg wins again.

Meta Platforms has acquired Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup that has been the talk of Silicon Valley since it was created this spring with a demo video so engaging it went viral. The clip shows an AI agent that can do things like screen job candidates, plan vacations, and analyze stock portfolios. Manus claimed at the time that it surpassed OpenAI’s Deep Research.

By April, just weeks after launch, early-stage company Benchmark led a $75 million funding round that gave Manus a post-money valuation of $500 million. General partner Chetan Puttagunta joined the board. Per Chinese media outletsother big-name backers had already invested in Manus at that point, including Tencent, ZhenFund, and HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China) through an early $10 million round.

Although Bloomberg raised questions when Manus began charging $39 or $199 a month for access to its AI models (the outlet noted that the price appears to be “quite aggressive . . . for the membership service that is still in a test phase, “) the company recently announced it has since signed up millions of users and crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

With that Meta began to negotiate with Manus, according to the WSJwhich says Meta is paying $2 billion – the same valuation Manus is seeking for its next round of funding.

For Zuckerberg, who staked Meta’s future on AI, Manus represents something new: an AI product that actually makes money (investors are increasingly nervous about the $60 billion cost of Meta’s infrastructure).

Meta says it will keep Manus running independently while building its agents on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, where Meta’s own chatbot, Meta AI, will be available to users.

There is one wrinkle, however, which is that Manus, which launched eight months ago, has Chinese founders who set up parent company Butterfly Effect in Beijing in 2022 before decamping to Singapore in the middle of this year. Whether that raises flags in Washington remains to be seen, but Senator John Cornyn has already dragged Benchmark for its investment in the company, asked back in May of X who thinks it’s “a good idea for American investors to subsidize our greatest enemy with AI, only for the CCP to use that technology to challenge us economically and militarily? Not me.”

Cornyn, a Texas Republican and senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has long been one of the most vocal hawks in Congress on Chinese competition and technology, but he is not alone. Toughness on China has become one of the true bipartisan issues in Congress.

No wonder, it’s Meta told Nikkei Asia that after the acquisition, Manus does not have any relationship to Chinese investors and will no longer operate in China. “There will be no continuing Chinese ownership interest in Manus AI following the transaction, and Manus AI will cease its services and operations in China,” a Meta spokesperson told the outlet.