Manus

AI Agents · Consumer AI

Launch

Manus launches Manus 2.0 platform and Cue personal-agent app

The launch arrives weeks after Beijing blocked Meta's roughly $2 billion bid for the company, as Manus pursues a new $4 billion valuation round.

• Manus launched Manus 2.0 and a standalone app called Cue, which gives each personal AI agent its own email address, phone number and digital wallet.
• Manus is a Singapore-based AI agent startup, originally founded in China, that builds its products on Anthropic's Claude and Alibaba's Qwen models rather than training its own foundation models.
• Manus 2.0's new Cascade agent harness reportedly cut token usage by 23.2%, task completion time by 28.2% and operating cost by 32% in one tested configuration, though Manus did not disclose its test methodology.
• Cue agents can text, take calls and pay within a budget the user sets, and users can group several agents so one researches, another shortlists and a third drafts work for the same task.
• The release follows China's government blocking a roughly $2 billion Meta acquisition of Manus in April 2026; the company resumed fully independent operations on September 1, 2026.
• Manus is reportedly in talks to raise $500 million at a roughly $4 billion valuation, about double the price of the blocked Meta deal, though the round has not closed.
• Days before the launch, security firm Salt Labs disclosed a prompt-injection flaw in Manus's email handling that let researchers execute code inside a victim's Manus environment; the bug has since been patched.
• Giving agents their own communication channels and spending budgets shifts the product from completing tasks to acting on a user's behalf, raising the stakes on how clearly those permissions are controlled.