Manus

What it is

Manus presents itself as "Hands On AI": a general-purpose AI agent product rather than a chat assistant^[1]. The distinction is the point of the product. A chat assistant answers inside a conversation window; an agent product is given a task and is expected to carry it through — searching, producing files, working across connected services — and to come back with something finished.

What it offers

The capabilities listed on its site span research and content production: Wide Research, AI slides, AI design, an AI image generator, an AI music generator and video^[1]. Around those outputs sits the machinery for running them — My Browser, desktop and mobile apps, a Slack integration, access to all models, and an API^[1]. Organisations are offered a Team plan, SSO and the API^[1]. The site's copyright line reads 2026 Manus AI^[1].

The result is an unusually wide surface for a single product: a browser of its own, apps on two kinds of device, a foothold inside a workplace messaging tool, a choice of underlying models, and a programmatic interface. That breadth is what separates an agent platform from a single-purpose generator — the same subscription is meant to cover a literature scan in the morning and a slide deck in the afternoon.

Manus 2.0

On 28 September 2026 the company shipped Manus 2.0, and insisted it was not a version update but a new architecture, new products and new capabilities^[2].

The centre of the release is Cascade, the latest iteration of Manus's in-house agent harness^[2]. A harness is the scaffolding around a model: it decides which tools the agent can reach, what context it carries from one step to the next, when a task counts as finished, and what happens when an action fails. The model sets a ceiling on quality; the harness largely determines how much of that ceiling a product actually reaches in practice. In one tested configuration, Cascade used 23.2% fewer tokens than the previous system, finished tasks in 28.2% less time, and cost 32% less to run^[2].

Three further pieces shipped alongside it. Cloud Computer is a dedicated environment for projects that outgrow a single machine, such as a multiplayer game server or an always-on automation^[2]. Automations let work begin when something happens in a connected service — a new email, a change in ad performance, a calendar event, a Slack message or a Notion update^[2]. And the desktop app was upgraded to Manus Studio, a shared workspace for people and AI that pulls in only the tools a project needs^[2].

Independence

Manus has also changed hands organisationally. On 11 August 2026 it told users it would soon return to operating as an independent company^[4]. On 1 September 2026 it announced that it had formally resumed independent operations, with its founding team continuing to lead the company^[3].

Where it sits

The product belongs to a generation of AI tools built around execution rather than conversation. Two things follow from that choice. The first is that usefulness is measured in finished artefacts — a report, a deck, a rendered image, a running service — rather than in the quality of a reply. The second is that an agent that touches email, advertising dashboards, calendars and documents needs infrastructure around it: a dedicated machine for long-running work, triggers that fire without a person present, enterprise sign-in, and a shared space where people can watch and correct what the agent is doing. Manus 2.0 is best read as an attempt to build all of that at once, and to make the underlying harness efficient enough that the breadth stays affordable.