Manus introduces My Computer, a desktop application that enables its AI agent to interact directly with the user's local files, tools, and applications
Until today, Manus has lived entirely in the cloud. — The cloud sandbox has served Manus well. Inside an isolated, secure environment …
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Context & Ripple Effects
Manus has been expanding the scope of its agent product: it introduced paid Starter and Pro tiers while still in beta, then added parallel-agent research work for Pro users. My Computer shifts that expansion from scaling cloud tasks to reaching the materials and software where much day-to-day work resides.
The move also raises the stakes for reliability. Early users had reported long waits, errors, and looping behavior, so an agent acting across local tools makes dependable execution and user control more central to product adoption.
First-order effects
Manus users can give its agent a desktop-level work surface spanning local files, tools, and applications rather than confining tasks to the prior cloud sandbox.
Manus must support a product that operates closer to users' working environments, where access choices and execution quality are immediately visible to users.
Second-order effects
The desktop app makes Manus more directly comparable with assistants that aim to execute workflows across a user's existing software, not merely generate or process work in a separate cloud environment.
Local access can make the service more valuable for workflows involving existing files and applications, while making its earlier reliability issues more consequential when tasks touch live work.
Third-order effects
If agents increasingly operate across local applications, competition will shift toward owning the execution layer of work: the permissions, interfaces, and reliability that connect models to actual workflows.
The likely industry divide is between cloud-contained agents and agents embedded in the work environment; the latter will face a higher bar for user trust and controllable autonomy.
The trend: This is part of the shift from cloud-based AI task services toward workflow-native agents that can act across the user's own computing environment.
Today, we're taking Manus out of the cloud and putting it on your desktop. Introducing My Computer, the core feature of the new Manus Desktop app. It's your AI agent, now on your local machine. [video]
Four companies launched OpenClaw competitors in three weeks. Manus may have just just dropped the most interesting one. “My Computer” can now access your local files, run terminal commands, build native apps, train ML models on your idle GPU, and operate your machine remotely [vi…
Can anyone explain this to me? First Claude Workspace, then Perplexity, now Manus - they keep using words like “my”, “personal”, and “local” in a way that suggests local information isn't being sent to a remote LLM or RAG system for evaluation. But if no local LLM is actually
i've been using manus for a while and i have to say i'm incredibly impressed. they seem to have made a real breakthrough on memory and it just gets the job done. huge unlock having it running on my machine.
this is wild! every major AI company is shipping something new every week. >Manus now runs directly on your desktop. it has full local machine access. files, apps, terminal, everything. a direct competitor to Openclaw, Claude Cowork, and Perplexity's computer agent. [video]
My Computer in action: 👉Organizing thousands of unsorted photos 👉Renaming hundreds of invoices 👉Build desktop apps in swift, entirely on your computer. No code written manually. 👉Combine with existing Connectors to create seamless automated workflows. 👉Create local
Manus Desktop is here! this has been a long time coming. Now @ManusAI can work directly on your computer. some of my fav things you can do: 👉finally organize that folder of 1000s of random photos 👉build and run a python script without opening a terminal 👉get a weekly
Worth noting that this company is owned by Meta and the blog post doesn't say one word about privacy or what happens to any of that data [embedded post]