Manus Founders Detained by China
America needs to rethink immigration for Founders and AI Researchers
China isn't allowing Manus founders to leave China. Manus is an autonomous AI agent that can execute multi-step tasks from start to finish. Manus is incorporated in Singapore. China claims they can block the Manus sale to Meta. This claim has weak legal grounds but strong practical grounds. If Manus founders don’t agree, the CCP makes them disappear.
Both Zhang Yiming of ByteDance and Su Hua of Kuaishou stepped down as CEO and chairman of their hundred billion dollar tech companies. As a successful Chinese founder, you either give up control or you disappear.
China has barred two co-founders of artificial intelligence startup Manus from leaving the country as regulators review whether Meta's $2 billion acquisition of the firm violated investment rules, the Financial Times reported.
Is this the end of Singapore washing?
Traditional “Singapore washing” now becomes mostly a marketing device but doesn’t add any extra liquidity for founders born in China. Given political tensions, many Chinese founders move their headquarters to Singapore. This makes global sales potentially easier. But if the founders return back to China, they can be detained at any time.
Historically, this means finance and operations is in Singapore. But engineering remains in China. What the Manus founder’s detention and acquisition blocking means is that for Singapore washing to work - the entire team needs to be in Singapore. Or at the very least, critical talent and servers must all be outside of China.
There is an opportunity here for countries to absorb talent that can create a lot of value. Countries that want to absorb founders and researchers must allow full family immigration. This eliminates the ability for loved ones to be used as hostages and the need for founders to return to their birthplace.
This is fascinating! Singapore and Dubai have been pushed as new centers for libertarian tech values and commerce recently, in part due to low taxes and the growing “network state” thesis. Many of the same people claim that the West (US and Europe) are falling, and some even seem to cheer for it. Recent events in Dubai and now this issue with Manus in Singapore make it seem that freedom in these places is more of a marketing strategy than reality, and their security is still quite reliant on Western power.