MANUS AI: China’s AGI Contender That’s Forcing OpenAI to Look Over Its Shoulder
- Rich Washburn
- Mar 21, 2025
- 4 min read
Let’s get right to it: Manus AI is the latest agent out of China that’s stirring up serious noise in the AI world. Launched in March 2025, it’s already being called a “second DeepSeek moment” and has over 2 million people on the waitlist—with invite codes rumored to be going for thousands on the gray market. Yep, that kind of buzz.
And after spending some quality time kicking the tires on this thing, I get the hype.
So What Is Manus AI?
Short answer: It’s not a chatbot. It’s not just a prompt-based text generator. Manus is a full-blown autonomous AI agent—designed to take a task from high-level instruction to full execution without constant hand-holding.
Think of it like hiring a virtual assistant who knows Python, reads articles, screens résumés, builds websites, and generates reports—and documents every step of the way.
This isn’t just “ChatGPT but with a nicer UI.” Manus is aiming for a new category altogether: the agent era of AI.
What Makes Manus AI Different?
Under the hood, Manus is built as a multi-agent system, meaning it doesn’t just rely on a single model to do everything. Each session spins up its own virtual workspace, acting like a self-contained digital brain with its own tools and memory.
Here’s what stood out:
Session-specific virtual environments: Manus handles files like a human would—unzipping, scanning, parsing, and compiling info.
Asynchronous execution: Give it a task, close your laptop, and get pinged when it’s done.
Memory and learning: Ask for a spreadsheet once, and next time it automatically delivers results in that format.
Research-to-action flow: It reads, evaluates, decides, and builds. That last one’s key.
Task planning: It doesn't just guess—it creates to-do lists and methodically executes steps, keeping you updated along the way.
It’s the first time I’ve seen an AI that behaves more like a project manager than a content generator.
Putting Manus to the Test
To see what this thing could really do, I threw a variety of real-world scenarios at it—nothing contrived or cherry-picked.
Résumé Screening
First, I sent it a ZIP file containing 10 résumés and asked it to evaluate the candidates. Manus unzipped the file, read each document, extracted key details, and returned a ranked list with justifications. I asked for the output in spreadsheet format—it generated that too. Then I added more résumés mid-task, and it handled them without blinking.
Real Estate Research
I asked it to help with a hypothetical apartment hunt in New York. Manus broke down the task, researched crime rates and school districts, calculated budget constraints with a Python script, pulled listings, and compiled everything into a neatly written report—complete with resources and data sources. It even offered budgeting code I could run to validate its logic.
Stock Correlation Analysis
Next, I had it run a correlation analysis between multiple stocks. It accessed APIs, pulled and validated data, wrote code for analysis and visualization, and then took it a step further—deployed the visualizations to a live website and gave me a sharable link.
And yes, the site actually worked.
Building an AI Workflow Agent
I wanted to see if Manus could help me build an AI website agent integrated with common CRMs. I gave it a prompt describing the platforms I wanted to use, the tone of the agent, and the kind of knowledge base it should maintain.
It responded with a full project blueprint—complete with diagrams, step-by-step implementation plans, knowledge base architecture, and even example conversation flows. I didn’t ask for half of that. It just did it.
Now, some of the tools it recommended (like specific community LLM nodes) didn’t align with what I’d use—but I gave it new constraints, and it pivoted smoothly. The final result wasn’t perfect, but it did 90% of the thinking for me. I just needed to tweak and plug the pieces into my preferred platform.
Presentation + Lead Magnet
For one final test, I asked Manus to help me create a 20-minute presentation, a landing page, and a lead magnet. In minutes, it returned scripts, slide content, headline options, and even copy for the landing page. It wasn’t pretty—no design polish—but the content itself was solid. Something I could easily take into Canva or another design tool and bring to life.
So... AGI? Not Quite. But It’s a Start.
Manus AI calls itself “a glimpse into AGI,” and while I wouldn’t go that far, it’s certainly pointing in that direction. It’s logical. It’s autonomous. It executes. That’s a massive leap forward from traditional LLMs that forget what you said three paragraphs ago.
That said, it’s not without flaws:
Speed: Complex tasks can take 15–20 minutes or more.
Context limitations: Feed it too much, and it might crash.
Factual errors: It’s still an LLM at heart—don’t blindly trust the output.
Cost: Estimated ~$2 per task, which can add up quickly.
Security concerns: An AI agent with autonomy over files, APIs, and deployments? That’s a digital forensics case waiting to happen if you're not careful.
These are solvable problems, but they’re worth keeping in mind before putting Manus in charge of anything sensitive.
Manus vs. OpenAI: A New Front in the AI Wars
The big takeaway? Manus beat OpenAI to market with a functional, agentic system. And it’s doing so with what’s allegedly a Claude wrapper underneath—meaning the real magic isn’t in the model, but the orchestration.
That’s a trend worth watching. Some of the most successful AI tools out there—Perplexity, Cursor, Glean—are essentially wrappers with great UX and workflows. Execution is the product.
Manus just proved that in spades.
Final Thoughts
Manus AI isn’t the final form of AI agents, but it’s an undeniably bold step forward. It doesn’t just assist—it acts. And in doing so, it’s forcing every other major player—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google—to rethink their agent strategies in real time.
It’s early. It’s raw. But it’s powerful.
And as more open-source agent frameworks emerge and multi-agent systems become the norm, tools like Manus will either be the foundation... or the spark that inspired something better.
Either way, the future of AI isn’t just conversational—it’s actionable.
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