Manus deletes user data Aug 23: back up your agent work

A boardroom deal you never signed is about to delete your work. Manus, the agentic AI startup, is returning to independent operations after Chinese regulators forced Meta to unwind its acquisition — and the separation comes with a data deletion window. Some users have until August 23, 2026 to back up their AI agent history before it is removed. If you run automation on a hosted agent platform, this is what vendor risk looks like when it finally reaches your account.

What actually happened

Per Manus's own note to users, the company will soon resume operating as an independent business. To meet regulatory requirements in specific jurisdictions, data generated by certain users on or after December 29, 2025 — the date the Meta deal closed — will be deleted. The schedule, in Singapore time:

• Back up until 7:59 a.m., August 23, 2026
• Deletion runs 8:00 a.m. August 23 through August 24, with account access suspended during the window
• Restore opens 8:00 a.m., August 25, 2026

Users outside the affected jurisdictions see no disruption and need to do nothing. Bloomberg and CNBC reported the separation on August 11, roughly eight months after Meta's reported $2 billion acquisition. China's NDRC blocked the deal in April and ordered it unwound. We wrote about the unwind when Tencent moved to buy Manus back. This is the part that lands on customers.

Why AI agent data portability matters for your business

Note what is being deleted. Not the product. Not your subscription. Your history — the runs, the context, the accumulated record of what your agents did and why. For a small operator, that history is often the only documentation of a process. Lose it and you lose the audit trail, the prompt tuning, and the "how did we do this last time" that makes the automation worth keeping.

Three moves, in order:

Export on a schedule, not on a notice. If your agent platform has an export API, run it weekly into storage you control. A deadline announced 12 days out is not enough time to build an exporter from scratch.

Keep the workflow definition outside the vendor. Prompts, routing rules, tool configs, and approval gates belong in your repo. When the platform blinks, that is the difference between a swap and a rebuild.

Log agent runs to your own store. Write inputs, outputs, and tool calls to a database you own, in parallel with the vendor's console. It costs almost nothing and it survives corporate reorganizations, forced unwinds, and vendors going away entirely.

Manus users get a restore path. That is more than most outages offer. Do not plan on it being standard.

Sources: Manus — A Note to Our Users, CNBC, Bloomberg.