Your AI vendor can change owner, and country, overnight

The AI agent tool Manus is returning to independent operation after Meta's roughly $2 billion deal was unwound, following a block from Chinese authorities. This is reported by CNBC and Bloomberg.

As part of the separation, the company said in its own post that some user data will be deleted on 23 to 24 August, and urged users to download whatever they want to keep before then. The service is back in operation after 25 August.

Note what this is not. Nobody broke in. Nobody breached a contract. Manus says explicitly that the deletion is not due to a security incident. What happened is that ownership changed for political reasons, and as a consequence data is moved and cleared.

That is exactly why the case is worth reading. Most companies have a plan for what happens if a system is hacked. Far fewer have a plan for what happens when the vendor is still there, but is no longer the same company.

We see the same pattern in many smaller companies: someone starts using an AI tool because it is good, it spreads through the team, and six months later part of the business's thinking sits in a service nobody asked the boring questions about. Where is what we type in stored? In which country? How do we get it out again if we want to stop?

The test is simple: if the tool stopped working on Monday, what stops working for you? If the answer is "nothing, we export every month", you are in good shape. If the answer is "most of our material lives there", you have just found your next project.

• Assume any vendor can do this. This is not about Manus. Build as if every tool can change owner, price or country.
• Have an export routine. Know how to get your material out, and do it regularly rather than in a panic.
• Never let an AI tool be the only home for anything business critical. The original belongs in your own system.
• Ask about data storage before signing. Where, for how long, and how you get it out. If you get no straight answer, that is also an answer.

That is how we work at Primetech: AI and automation that starts from your task and your data, vendor-neutral and with no lock-in. Want to know how dependent you are on your AI tools today? Book a free consultation and we will go through it in plain language.