Manus just announced a strategic partnership with Alibaba's Qwen team to develop a Chinese version of its autonomous agent platform, following the company’s viral success over the past week. - The collaboration will integrate Manus's agent capabilities with Qwen's open-source language models and computing infrastructure.
- Manus, which currently runs on both Anthropic’s Claude and Qwen, will adapt its full feature set for Chinese users and domestic platforms.
- The partnership follows Manus' invitation-only preview that demonstrated capabilities surpassing OpenAI’s DeepResearch on agentic benchmarks.
- Qwen has also had a busy month, launching a new open-source reasoning model (QwQ-32B) and major upgrades to its chat platform.
We’ve seen plenty of viral AI products fade fast, but a partnership with one of China’s top AI labs suggests there’s more here than just hype. While many dismissed Manus for running on Claude, it’s becoming clear that real value lies in packaging top models with the right tools, workflows, and interface.