Manus: China reveals first fully autonomous AI agent

A Chinese technology team has unveiled Manus, the world’s first AI Agent product, developed by Monica.im. The launch coincided with Apple’s new product release, drawing significant interest from users seeking invitation codes.

According to Monica.im, Manus is an autonomous AI agent designed to handle complex and dynamic tasks beyond conventional AI assistants. Unlike traditional AI tools that provide suggestions or answers, Manus delivers complete task results through independent execution.

A four-minute demonstration showcased Manus autonomously executing tasks from planning to completion. In one example, the AI agent screened candidates for a reinforcement learning algorithm engineer position by manually reviewing and extracting key details from resumes.

Manus has set a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance benchmark across all difficulty levels in the GAIA test, which assesses general AI assistant capabilities.

The project is led by Xiao Hong, a software engineering graduate from Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Xiao previously founded Ye Ying Technology in 2015 and launched AI-powered assistant tools, securing investments from Tencent and ZhenFund.

He later developed Monica, an AI assistant that integrates large models such as Claude 3.5 and DeepSeek, reaching over a million users in overseas markets.

Manus follows a "less structure, more intelligence" approach, focusing on data quality, model power, and flexible architecture rather than predefined features.

The release comes as major AI firms increasingly invest in AI agents. On March 6, OpenAI announced pricing for its doctor-level AI agents at $20,000 per month, targeting industries such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing.