Manus debuts Manus 2.0, its latest AI agent, and Cue, a new standalone app for personal agents, each with its own email, phone number, wallet, and computer
Manus, an artificial intelligence startup founded in China, is expanding its AI agent offerings, aiming to gain further ground in one of the tech industry's hottest areas.
Context & Ripple Effects
Manus had already been broadening its agent from a beta service with paid Starter and Pro tiers into a product that could work across a user's own environment. Its March My Computer desktop app connected the agent to local files, tools and applications, while Wide Research extended Pro users' work across dozens of parallel agents.
Cue takes that progression from task execution toward a dedicated personal-agent product. The launch also arrives after early users had reported long waits, errors and looping behavior, making reliable execution central to whether a broader agent role is credible.
First-order effects
- Cue gives Manus users a standalone place to deploy personal agents with their own email address, phone number, wallet and computer, rather than limiting the product to a single task interface.
- Manus must operate and support a more persistent agent experience alongside Manus 2.0, increasing the importance of account, tool and transaction controls.
Second-order effects
- Cue puts Manus in a more direct product comparison with Meta's Muse, which The Information framed as the competing personal-agent offering.
- The move raises the value of Manus's existing desktop and parallel-research features because users can judge whether those capabilities work together as one personal-agent service.
Third-order effects
- If personal agents increasingly receive dedicated communications, payment and computing identities, competition shifts from isolated agent outputs toward control of the user's ongoing work surface.
- That model makes reliability and governance more consequential than a one-off demo: failures reported by early Manus users become constraints on adoption when agents hold broader operating roles.
The trend: AI-agent products are evolving from tools that complete discrete requests into persistent personal work surfaces with their own operating identities.