A new Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) platform called Manus AI claims to have developed the world’s first fully autonomous AI agent, which is making waves globally as a new impressive AI benchmark that follows the success of fellow Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek.

Some early users were enthusiastic about the product’s capabilities; others complained it took too long and crashed.

Unlike ChatGPT, Claude, and other single-model systems, Manus claims to be the "world's first general AI agent" by using multiple AI models working in tandem — such as Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Qwen, and various independent agents to tackle a wide range of tasks.