00:00Turning to technology, China ordering to cancel Meta's $2 billion acquisition of
00:04agentic AI startup Manus. We are getting an email statement from Meta now saying that everything was
00:10in accordance with all the rules and it doesn't expect to see any more difficulty. But let's get
00:16more from Matt Bloxham of Bloomberg Intelligence. Give us the background to this story, Matt,
00:20and why China might have a problem. Yeah, so Manus, as you said, is an agentic AI startup.
00:26And as we know, the world is shifting very rapidly towards agentic AI as the kind of
00:31near term future of that technology. And it's in an area that Meta has been looking to kind of
00:36boost its capabilities now. Manus was originally a Chinese founded business and reincorporated
00:43in Singapore, but it's got Chinese founders and those Chinese founders are in China and
00:47they're being blocked from leaving the company, leaving the country. So I think clearly, you know,
00:51this is an issue about technology transfer from one superpower to another. And that's
00:58why we're seeing this Chinese clamp down. To be honest, it was a little bit surprising
01:01that this deal had been waved through initially. So it's not a big surprise that there's been
01:07this kind of pushback. I think it is a story that's going to kind of bounce around for quite
01:11a while. But, you know, I think given that China has essentially blocked these founders
01:15from leaving the country, there's going to be a huge amount of pressure for them to kind
01:19of roll back on the deal. Yeah. And again, Meta out with a new nailed statement saying
01:23it completed the Manus transaction fully and in accordance with applicable law and anticipates
01:27a resolution to the probe.
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