Manus just gave its AI agent a body: an email address, a phone number, and a wallet. The update, called Manus 2.0, turns what used to be a single chat assistant into something closer to a personal employee that can be reached, called, and even trusted with a spending limit.
The headline feature is a new app called Cue. Each agent inside Cue gets its own contact details and its own cloud computer to work from. You can ask it to book a table, and it will call the restaurant. You can set several agents to work together on a project, and they will split tasks and coordinate with each other. The desktop app, now renamed Manus Studio, adds a video editor and a game development mode, plus dedicated servers to keep multiplayer games running after they are built.
Manus also claims its new agent engine, called Cascade, is far cheaper to run than the old one, using close to a quarter less computing power and cutting costs by about a third in one test. That is a meaningful number if it holds up, since running AI agents at scale has been expensive for every company in this space. But it is a company reported figure, not one confirmed by outside testing, so treat it as a claim rather than a fact for now.
This launch did not happen in a vacuum. Manus had a rough year. Meta agreed to buy the company for about two billion dollars in December, only for Chinese regulators to order the deal unwound in April, worried about a homegrown AI company ending up in American hands. Meta walked away in June. Since then, Tencent has entered talks to become Manus's largest outside shareholder, and Manus itself is now raising fresh money at a four billion dollar valuation, roughly double what Meta had agreed to pay.
Meta, for its part, did not wait around. It built its own version of the same idea and launched it in September under the name Muse: a personal AI agent that also runs on its own dedicated cloud computer and can act on a user's behalf across email, messaging, and other apps. The two products now compete directly for the same idea: an AI assistant you don't just talk to, but one that goes and does things while holding its own credentials.
For any business owner, the interesting part is not the video editor or the game servers. It is the wallet. Giving software a phone number and spending authority is a real shift in how much control a business hands to a machine, and it raises new questions about mistakes, fraud, and who is responsible when an autonomous agent makes a bad call with real money. Manus is moving fast on this, and competitors will follow. Before adopting agents that can spend or communicate on your behalf, it is worth asking what happens the first time one gets it wrong, because that moment is coming for every company that adopts this kind of tool.