A new Chinese artificial intelligence agent, Manus, has rapidly captured the attention of the AI community with its ability to handle complex, real-world tasks.
Developed by a low-profile team and backed by Chinese investors and developers, Manus is currently available as an invitation-only web preview. A demonstration video on its website, manus.im, showcases its ability to create a custom website through a step-by-step process.
Newsweek contacted Manus via its website for this story.
Why It Matters
China has been at the helm of several AI breakthroughs in 2025. The launch of DeepSeek in January, described as a “Sputnik moment” for U.S. AI development, showed that China was able to produce functional Large Language Models (LLMs) for a fraction of the cost of American industry leaders, and Manus shows that this kind of progress can be repeated.
What To Know
Manus’ website says it is focused on real-world complex tasks, giving the examples of devising an itinerary for a trip to Japan, providing an in-depth analysis of Tesla‘s stock, creating interactive courses for middle-school teachers, comparing different insurance policies, and assisting in business-to-business supplier sourcing.
Manus also claims to outperform OpenAI‘s Deep Research based on the GAIA benchmark, a third-party measure of general AI assistants.
Despite limited information about its corporate structure, team, and underlying models, Manus has generated significant interest. The demonstration video, published on X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday, garnered over 200,000 views by Thursday.
This surge in popularity mirrors the buzz following the launch of DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model in January. General-purpose AI agents, capable of interacting with their environment, collecting data, and autonomously handling tasks to achieve predetermined goals, are widely regarded as the future of AI applications.
According to the demo, Manus can autonomously browse websites, leverage various capabilities, and display its workflow in real time. The developers describe it as “a general AI agent that bridges minds and actions: it doesn’t just think, it delivers results.”
Shanghai,China-Feb.17th 2024: Google Gemini, OpenAI ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot app icons on screen. Shanghai,China-Feb.17th 2024: Google Gemini, OpenAI ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot app icons on screen. Getty Images
The demo video is hosted by Ji Yichao, a 33-year-old Chinese entrepreneur and tech enthusiast known for creating the mobile browser Mammoth and founding Peak Labs in the U.S.
What People Are Saying
In the demonstration, presenter Ji Yichao said: “This isn’t just another chatbot or workflow. It’s a truly autonomous agent that bridges that gap between conception and execution. While other AIs stop at generating ideas, Manus delivers results.”
What Happens Next
Manus is continuing to operate on an invite-only system for the time being, though it is expected to switch to free use at some point in the future.
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