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AI NewsChina’s Manus raises over $500M in first funding round since split with Meta

China’s Manus raises over $500M in first funding round since split with Meta

7:03 PM IST · October 8, 2026

China’s Manus raises over $500M in first funding round since split with Meta

Chinese AI lab Manus’ parent company, Butterfly Effect, said on Thursdayin a WeChat postthat it has raised more than $500 million, the company’s first funding round since Meta was forced to call off its $2 billion acquisition of the startup. Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the funding round, and existing shareholders Tencent, HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China), ZhenFund and others also participated. The AI company said it will continue hiring both at home and abroad. Manus did not disclose its valuation, but it waslast month said to be in talkswith investors to raise $500 million at a $4 billion valuation. Manus, which went viral following a demo of its AI agent last year, relocated its staff to Singapore in mid-2025 beforeannouncinga $2 billion acquisition deal with Meta that December. The startup was said to be pulling in annual recurring revenue of over $100 million at the time. In April,Chinese authorities orderedthe AI startup to unwind the deal amid intensifying worries in China over losing AI talent and researchers to the West. Manusin August resumedindependent operations following the end of the Meta deal, and said it was required to delete some user data as part of the split. The company is also reported to be considering going public in Hong Kong, according to the report. Manus did not respond to TechCrunch’s questions about its valuation. Manus makes AI products and agents similar to what companies like Cursor, Lovable, and Replit offer. It offers a chatbot and vibe-coding tools to let users build apps and websites, create designs and presentations, generate video, and more. The company recentlylaunched Manus 2.0, which it says brings a new architecture with new products and capabilities built around a new harness. It also introduced Cue, a standalone app that gives personal AI agents their own email addresses, phone numbers, digital wallets, and computers. The app lets agents communicate, handle tasks across services, and make payments within limits set by the user.

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Disney agrees to hire the majority of Character.AI’s workforce

Disney agrees to hire the majority of Character.AI’s workforce

After chatbot startup Character.AIfiled for bankruptcyearlier this week, many of its employees will have the opportunity to take jobs at Disney. Character.AI’s former CEO Karandeep Anand recentlybecame the entertainment giant’s first CTO, and the startup previously said that Disney had agreed to acquire some of its assets for $20 million. Alegal filingspotted byBloombergrevealed more details about the agreement between Character.AI and Disney, with Disney agreeing to make employment offers to at least 60 Character.AI employees — the majority of the workforce — paying them an estimated $60 million in annual compensation. The filing also says that the “vast majority” of Character.AI employees who were offered jobs at Disney accepted them. However, this is a stalking horse bid, so another company could come forward with a higher offer. The filing says that despite its “large and engaged user base,” Character.AI has been hobbled by high costs and “potential litigation-related liabilities and regulatory engagement.” (The company wassued by the mother of a 14-year-old boywho said her son became obsessed with one of Character.AI’s chatbots before committing suicide; it alsofaces government investigations over child safety concerns.)

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Replit makes OpenAI its default over Anthropic, CEO says

Replit makes OpenAI its default over Anthropic, CEO says

Replit, the AI coding platform that has become a favorite of startup founders and developers, is no longer working with Anthropic, the company’s CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad said Thursday while onstage atTechCrunch Disrupt. Masad said the decision was made for a number of different reasons, including cost. Replitannounceda partnership with OpenAI in August, but there was never any indication that it was no longer partnering with Anthropic. “I think ChatGPT is better now,” Masad said, adding that the company uses an internal benchmark to help assess metrics like performance. “We publish a public benchmark as well, and consistently, Sol and Astra perform better on building vibe-coded applications from scratch. It was a decision based on both cost, partnership, and performance. And for all these reasons, we just felt like they were a better partner for now.” It seems, however, that Anthropic hasn’t been completely cut out of Replit, which sells a cloud-based software development platform where users can develop and deploy apps directly from inside their browser. After Disrupt, Masad clarified that customers can still access Anthropic models on the platform, but that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is now the default. This shift could significantly reduce Replit’s spend with Anthropic since most customers stick with the default rather than selecting a model themselves. Prior to striking a deal with OpenAI, Replit relied on Anthropic’s Claude models to run its platform. That partnership was said to havehelpedthe company grow its revenue significantly, and Masad noted on stage that Replit had been, until recently, a top-five customer of Anthropic’s. “Replit remains model agnostic,” Masad told TechCrunch over the weekend. “Our users can choose Anthropic’s Claude or other supported models…OpenAI is now our preferred partner for powering Replit Agent, based on performance, economics, and the strength of our partnership.” Masad’s comments on stage were rejected by insiders familiar with the partnership between the Anthropic and Replit, however. One person familiar, who asked not to be named, said the partnership was still in place. There is evidence onthe company’s website, blog posts, and social media posts that Replit was promoting Anthropic products as recently as a few weeks ago. For instance, ablog postin late September cites Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 as models running in Replit Agent’s production environment. Around the same time, one of Replit’s product employeespostedon X about using Anthropic’s flagship model Opus 5.5 and promoting its capabilities. Masad also shared insights about the company’s growth while onstage at Disrupt, noting that enterprise is starting to provide a larger slice of revenue. “We’re not sharing ARR numbers just yet, but in terms of growth, like, I would say, enterprise was like 2% of revenue last year,” Masad said. “This year, I would say like 15% of our revenue is enterprise contracts, and more than 50% of our revenue is B2B.” Backstage, Masad told TechCrunch that he expects more than half of Replit’s revenue to come from enterprise and government customers in 2027. Masad also commented on the necessity for good AI safety measures. “In the same way that us humans need a certain environment to work — you need a nice office, maybe nice good food in the office, air-conditioning, computer — agents need a habitat for them to exist and do good work,” he said. “So that habitat has good orchestration, good error recovery, good safety and security and sandboxing, good networking, good identity and authorization. And once you figure all of that out, then you can deploy AI safely.” This article was originally published on October 16 at 2:22 pm PT. It has been updated to include more context around Replit’s partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI.

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Anthropic says its workforce has become less junior and is spending more time in meetings

Anthropic says its workforce has become less junior and is spending more time in meetings

The composition of Anthropic’s workforce and the type of work getting done have changed significantly in the past year, according toa reportthat the AI company published on Friday. Anthropic argues that its own workplace trends could be indicators of “how AI will shift work organization, hiring, and labor demand across the economy,” especially since the company “has thoroughly molded its workflows around AI.” But even if other organizations never embrace AI as thoroughly or in the exact same way as Anthropic, the report offers an intriguing glimpse at how the company currently operates. Notably, Anthropic is making fewer junior hires, with the proportion of junior-level employees in technical departments falling from 21% to 14% since early 2025, and the proportion of junior technical hires falling even more sharply, from 27% to 9%. Anthropic also says that technical teams now represent a smaller share of the overall workforce, falling from 61% to 56% — a trend that it attributes to  “natural expansion of business functions as the company scales,” as well as “coding tools increasingly allowing non-technical employees to make software themselves.” One employee reportedly described an “eternal pressure at Anthropic to move as fast as possible and use Claude for everything.” In an April 2026 survey, 27% of employees said they had become more productive because of Claude  and 20% said their job had shifted “from actually doing work to managing Claudes”; apparently one engineered compared this to babysitting: “When you are babysitting, every child brings to you concerns with an equal demand for your attention and the various [Claudes] also do that.” In fact, the report suggests “human attention and judgement” are becoming a “bottleneck” for productivity, as Claude produces a “deluge” of text that needs to be read and organized. Unsurprisingly, the report argues that AI adoption has made the company more productive, as indicated by “more code per person, closing more sales per rep, and processing more contracts.” The company acknowledges that “more code does not necessarily mean better code or business impact,” but it also hasn’t found any indications that code quality is declining. The report says that based on calendar data, meeting time per employee is up 20% compared to a year ago, and it’s up 16% for technical contributors. The company attributes this to the importance of “human trust and accountability,” with employees repeatedly describing “face-to-face coordination as indispensable.”

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Meta removes language that raised scraping and AI training concerns

Meta removes language that raised scraping and AI training concerns

Meta recently updated its commercial terms of use, declaring that the company can “use any content from [a business account’s] domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” Meta products and services. According tolegal experts interviewed by Nieman Lab, this looked like a “remarkable provision” that could give Meta permission to scrape the website of any publisher with a Meta business account and use the content to train the company’s AI models. (WhileMeta defeated a high-profile lawsuit over alleged copyright infringementlast year,other casesagainst AI companies, including Meta, continue.) However, a Meta spokespersoninsistedthat the updated terms did not reflect a change in the way Meta crawls the web. And now,The Verge reportsthat the provision has been removed. “We’ve heard you and want to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves,” the company said in a statement. “It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers.”

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