Manus says data created by certain users since Meta’s December 29, 2025 acquisition will be deleted across August 23 and 24, with affected accounts locked for both days and a backup window that closes at 7:59 a.m. SGT on August 23.
- Manus will delete data that certain users created on or after December 29, 2025, across August 23 and 24.
- Those accounts stay locked for both days. The backup window shuts at 7:59 a.m. SGT on August 23.
- The deletion is a condition of Manus leaving Meta, after Beijing ordered the $2 billion deal unwound.
Manus said in a notice posted to its blog that data generated by certain users on or after December 29, 2025 will be deleted from 8:00 a.m. on August 23 through August 24, Singapore Standard Time (SGT), and that the affected accounts will be locked for the whole of that stretch. The company opened a backup window the same day. It closes at 7:59 a.m. SGT on August 23, which is 7:59 p.m. EDT on August 22.
December 29, 2025 is the day Meta acquired Manus. Every task, file, and agent run an affected user has produced since then sits inside the deletion set. That is roughly eight months of work, and the window to copy it out is 12 days.
Manus has not said what happens to data an affected user fails to back up before the cutoff. The notice describes a backup tool, a deletion, and a restoration portal that opens at 8:00 a.m. SGT on August 25. It does not describe a grace period.
A Note to Our Users
— Manus (@ManusAI) August 11, 2026
Manus will soon resume operating as an independent company.
As part of this transition and to comply with regulatory requirements in specific jurisdictions, some users will need to back-up their data before 7:59 a.m. on August 23, 2026 (SGT) and then begin…
The company is naming the cause but not the countries
Manus attributes the deletion to the breakup rather than to any incident. “This is part of our separation from Meta; we must take this step to comply with regulatory requirements in specific parts of the world,” the company said in the FAQ attached to the notice. On the question of a breach, it was flat: “It is not the result of any security incident.“
What the notice does not do is name the jurisdictions or define the affected user group. It says “certain users” and “specific jurisdictions” and then routes readers to a Help Center guide to check their own status. Affected users get an in-app notice and an email. Unaffected users get only the in-app notice and no email at all.
That routing creates one predictable gap. Users who registered through an Apple ID or a Facebook account have no email on file, so Manus is asking them to watch in-app notifications. The people least likely to see the warning, in other words, include the ones who signed up through Meta.
How a $2 billion acquisition became a deletion schedule?
Meta announced the Manus purchase in late December 2025 at a reported $2 billion. In April 2026, China’s National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s top economic planning agency, ordered the transaction reversed on national security grounds, a decision SQ Magazine covered when Beijing moved against the deal. Bloomberg reported in June that Meta had cut Manus staff out of its internal systems and halted data sharing between the two companies. The Information reported this week that Manus would return as an independent company.
Manus is Singapore-headquartered and was founded by Xiao Hong, Ji Yichao, and Zhang Tao, who moved the core team out of Beijing in mid-2025. Its founders have been working to raise about $1 billion to buy the company back. Its own materials put lifetime processing above 147 trillion tokens, a scale that puts it among the more heavily used general agent platforms tracked in AI agent autonomy benchmarks.
The deletion boundary tracks ownership, not geography. Data created before Meta owned Manus survives. Data created while Meta owned Manus goes, for some users, in some places. Regulators unwinding a cross-border AI deal are treating the training and task exhaust of an agent platform as an asset that has to be returned, and the cleanest way to return it is to destroy the copy. Users of every agent product built on foreign capital now have a template for what an unwind looks like from the inside, and it sits some distance from what surveys of customer data privacy expectations suggest people assume about their own files.
What to do before 7:59 a.m. SGT on August 23?
Affected users should run the backup now instead of waiting on a reminder, then run it again after any new task, since the tool supports repeat backups and only captures what existed when it ran. Anyone who signed up with an Apple ID or a Facebook login should open the app and check notifications directly. Anyone holding work in Manus that exists nowhere else, such as a client deliverable or a research thread, should assume the local copy is now the authoritative one until August 25.
Manus said it will not charge affected users between August 11 and August 23 and is offering a welcome back bonus after restoration. Subscription specifics are going out by email and in-app notice.
What is still unanswered?
Three things are open. Manus has not published the list of affected jurisdictions, so users have to check a status page to learn whether the rule reaches them. It has not said how many accounts are in scope. And it has not said whether unbacked data is recoverable in any form after August 24.
The backup tool is live. The restoration portal opens at 8:00 a.m. SGT on August 25. Between those two timestamps there is a two-day window in which the correct assumption is that nothing is being held for you.
