Asia
China’s Manus Turns Its AI Agent Into a $39 Subscription
The move to monetize the Manus AI agent so soon after its arrival runs counter to the all-out contest to acquire users in China.
Photographer: Lam Yik/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
The recently released Manus artificial intelligence agent is becoming a subscription service, marking a rapid pace to commercialization after it drew comparisons to DeepSeek.
The Beijing-based startup behind Manus has set up a $39-per-month tier and a $199 upgraded option, the latter in line with OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro. That’s aggressive pricing for a membership service that is still in its beta testing stage. But the young company has drawn significant attention for its promise to have its bot perform jobs for users, acting as an agent and doing complex tasks rather than just responding to prompts.