China has blocked Meta's planned $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus, ordering the deal withdrawn after months of scrutiny from both Beijing and Washington. "The decision to prohibit foreign investment in Manus was made in accordance with laws and regulations," reports CNBC, citing the National Development and Reform Commission. "It added that it has asked the parties involved to withdraw the acquisition transaction." From the report: The deal had attracted scrutiny from both China and Washington, as lawmakers in the U.S. have prohibited American investors from backing Chinese AI companies directly. Meanwhile, Beijing has increased efforts to discourage Chinese AI founders from moving business offshore. The Chinese government's intervention in the transaction drew alarm among tech founders and venture capitalists in the country who were hoping to take advantage of the so-called Singapore-washing model, where companies relocate from China to the city-state to avoid scrutiny from Beijing and Washington. Manus was founded in China before relocating to Singapore. The company develops general purpose AI agents and launched its first general AI agent in March last year, which can execute complex tasks such as market research, coding and data analysis. The release saw the startup lauded as the next DeepSeek. Manus said it had passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, in December, eight months on from launching a product, which it claimed made it the fastest startup in the world at the time to hit the milestone from $0. The company raised $75 million in a round led by U.S. VC Benchmark in April last year.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: The whale has resurfaced. DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup offshoot of High-Flyer Capital Management quantitative analysis firm, became a near-overnight sensation globally in January 2025 with the release of its open source R1 model that matched proprietary U.S. giants. It's been an epoch in AI since then, and while DeepSeek has released several updates to that model and its other V3 series, the international AI and business community has been largely waiting with baited breath for the follow-up to the R1 moment. Now it's arrived with last night's release of DeepSeek-V4, a 1.6-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model available free under commercially-friendly open source MIT License, which nears -- and on some benchmarks, surpasses -- the performance of the world's most advanced closed-source systems at approximately 1/6th the cost over the application programming interface (API). This release -- which DeepSeek AI researcher Deli Chen described on X as a "labor of love" 484 days after the launch of V3 -- is being hailed as the "second DeepSeek moment." As Chen noted in his post, "AGI belongs to everyone". It's available now on AI code sharing community Hugging Face and through DeepSeek's API. The new DeepSeek-V4-Pro model delivers "near-frontier performance" at a much lower price, costing $5.22 for 1 million input and 1 million output tokens compared with $35 for GPT-5.5 and $30 for Claude Opus 4.7. That makes it roughly 1/7th the cost of GPT-5.5 and 1/6th the cost of Claude Opus 4.7, reinforcing VentureBeat's point that DeepSeek is "compressing advanced model economics into a much lower band." While GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7 still lead on most benchmarks, DeepSeek-V4-Pro gets close enough that its lower cost could "force a major rethink of the economics of advanced AI deployment."

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