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- Meta’s Manus acquisition blocked by China
Meta’s Manus acquisition blocked by China
PLUS: Google will invest $40 billion in Anthropic
Barsee
27 Apr
Together with
howdy, it’s Barsee again.
happy monday, AI family, and welcome back to AI Valley.
here are the biggest things worth knowing today:
Meta’s $2 billion Manus acquisition blocked by China
Google will invest $40 billion in Anthropic
A tiny island is quietly making millions from the AI boom
Anthropic lets Claude agents buy, sell, and negotiate deals
Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources
Let’s dive into the Valley of AI…
PRESENTED BY LAYERS
Courtesy: Layers
AI made building easier. Growth is still the bottleneck.
Most app teams are stuck stitching together content tools, ad platforms, analytics, attribution, and manual workflows just to figure out what actually drives installs, conversions, and revenue.
Layers gives you one system to put the parts of growth you want on autopilot, while keeping you as hands-on as you want to be. Generate scroll-stopping creative, automate TikTok and Instagram workflows, launch campaigns across Apple, Meta, TikTok, Google, and YouTube, and measure what actually turns attention into users.
It is built for founders, developers, and lean teams shipping apps that need traction, not more complexity.
Instead of hiring more vendors, managing more dashboards, or guessing which channel will work, Layers helps you create faster, test faster, and scale what performs.
If you are building an app and trying to turn growth into a repeatable engine, Layers gives you the operating system to do it.
THROUGH THE VALLEY
1/ Meta’s $2 billion Manus acquisition blocked by China
Meta has reportedly been ordered by China to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus, in a rare move that reverses a deal after it had already closed. The notice is said to have come from China’s National Development and Reform Commission, citing foreign ownership and national security concerns tied to advanced AI assets. It is still unclear how the deal would be reversed, with money already transferred and staff reportedly integrated after Manus moved operations to Singapore. The decision could cool China’s startup market and adds another setback for Meta as it races against OpenAI and Anthropic.
2/ Google will invest as much as $40 billion in Anthropic
Google will invest at least $10 billion in Anthropic, with the total potentially rising to $40 billion if performance targets are met, according to Bloomberg. The report comes days after Amazon committed $5 billion under a similar structure, with both deals said to value Anthropic at $350 billion. Demand has surged as Claude and tools like Claude Code gain traction with businesses looking to move faster and automate internal work. The funding would also help Anthropic lock in more chips and cloud capacity, showing how infrastructure has become one of the biggest weapons in the AI race.
3/ A tiny island is quietly making millions from the AI boom
Every time a startup buys a .ai domain, part of that money goes to Anguilla, the small Caribbean island that controls the extension. It was assigned .ai in the 1990s as part of the global domain system, years before artificial intelligence became a major industry. After ChatGPT triggered a startup wave, founders began using .ai as a badge of modern tech, pushing registrations from around 60,000 to more than 1 million. The boom has become so large that domain revenue now reportedly makes up nearly half of Anguilla’s national budget, helping pay for tax cuts, healthcare, and a new airport.
4/ Anthropic lets Claude agents buy, sell, and negotiate deals
Anthropic recently ran Project Deal, a week-long internal test where 69 employees handed buying and selling decisions entirely to Claude agents with no human approval. Each participant started with a $100 budget, while the AI created listings, negotiated prices, accepted offers, and completed trades inside Slack. The experiment produced 186 deals worth more than $4,000 across over 500 listed items. It also exposed a clear gap in model quality: Claude Opus agents consistently got better prices and closed more deals than Haiku versions, while most users did not realize they were getting worse results. The future of AI commerce may arrive faster than expected, but not all agents will be equal.”
PRESENTED BY AMD
Courtesy: AMD
AMD AI DevDay is April 30th in SF! Register now and join hands-on workshops (agents, post-training, kernel optimization), open AI tooling with ROCm, and hear from the engineers behind it all.
Plus, you'll receive exclusive swag.
Don't get FOMO. If you're building AI, this is your room.
Register now before it fills up.
TRENDING TOOLS
Spoki > Create and manage marketing campaigns, sales, customer service via WhatsApp, SMS, and Voice using AI, just by writing a simple prompt (sponsored)
ChatGPT Images 2.0 > OpenAI’s next-generation image model built for sharper visuals, stronger reasoning, and more reliable creative control
Happenstance > Search your entire network with plain-language questions and instantly surface people you or your contacts already know
ZeroHuman > An AI co-founder that validates ideas, builds products, and runs growth on autopilot
WHAT I'M CONSUMING
THE VALLEY GEMS
THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY
Thank you for reading today’s edition. That’s all for today’s issue.
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