Chinese AI company Manus has laid out its plans to operate as an independent company following the reversal of its acquisition by Meta.
The US social media company agreed to buy Manus last year but Chinese regulators quickly opened an investigation into the deal, as they were concerned that it violated Chinese export controls. In April, China's National Development and Reform Commission blocked the purchase.
Manus will now revert to being an independent company and to meet with regulatory requirements must delete some user data collected while it was part of Meta, it said Tuesday.
The failure of the deal illustrates the problems that US and Chinese companies are having as they attempt to build a hold on the AI market.
While regulatory authorities in China don't want Manus under US ownership, US authorities are equally suspicious of China's role in AI development. The US administration fired a warning shot this March by unveiling a new cybersecuri
OpenAI today said it is "pausing" activities involving its upcoming AI model Astra, because its cyber capabilities are potentially too dangerous. OpenAI says its newest internal evaluations show "significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity," and it cannot rule out "critical cyber capabilities." Prior OpenAI models, including GPT-5.6 Sol, were labeled as "High."
Yeah, this is a strange one. In terms of form factor, the whole 2.1 unit is basically a boom box or perhaps an especially large speaker bar. That bottom section houses a pair of 52mm drivers and a 100mm woofer, a 60-watt amp, and a pair of passive radiators. Up top is a 2.8-inch screen over the area where a "CPU" would be if this was a PC (again, this is not a PC), and various blocks and LED-bedecked sections roughly mimic RAM DIMMs, SSDs, fans, and GPUs sitting on top of a motherboard. Those things that look like coolant lines are, allegedly, braided speaker cables.
Amazon has announced it is investing $2.75 billion in OpenAI rival Anthropic, bringing its total investment in the AI startup to $4 billion, as initially announced. In September last year, Amazon had invested an initial tranche of $1.25 billion.
As part of this partnership, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its main cloud provider for key operations, including safety research and the development of foundational models. Anthropic will also use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips for building, training, and deploying future models.
