Meta's Manus launches desktop app to bring AI agent directly onto personal devices

Meta's Manus launches desktop app to bring its AI agent onto personal devices amid OpenClaw craze

The Manus logo is displayed on a smartphone screen, with the Meta logo visible in the background. Artificial intelligence start-up Manus, recently acquired by Meta, launched a new desktop application Monday that brings its AI agent directly onto personal laptops. The company's general agent -- which can execute complex, multi-step tasks -- previously operated exclusively in the cloud, and was typically accessed through a web interface. However, through the new Manus Desktop application, a feature called 'My Computer' lets its agents work directly with local files, tools and applications on a user's device. The expanded offering aligns Meta and Manus's agents more closely with OpenClaw, an open-sourced AI agent that is also downloaded onto users' local devices. OpenClaw was founded by Austrian software developer Peter Steinberger late last year, and its popularity has helped spark an AI agent frenzy. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described OpenClaw as the "next ChatGPT' in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC's "Mad Money" Tuesday. Steinberger has also been hired by ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which represents one of Meta's main AI competitors. Unlike OpenClaw, which is free and open-sourced under an MIT license, Manus is primarily a paid subscription service. According to Manus, its My Computer offering allows its agent to read, analyze, edit files, and launch or control applications on the machine. For example, the company said that users can instruct Manus to organize thousands of internal images on their hard drive. Beyond file management, My Computer is also compatible with coding applications and can create an app within minutes, it said. Those capabilities will be added to existing Manus capabilities, which include integration with services such as Google Calendar, Gmail, and various third-party platforms. While such capabilities offer much promise, experts have also flagged potential security and privacy issues with granting AI agents, such as those from OpenClaw, access to local devices. In its post, Manus said that My Computer will keep users "firmly in control," by requiring explicit approval before executing tasks. These options include "Allow Once" for individual review or "Always Allow" for trusted, recurring actions, it said. Meta announced on Dec. 29, 2025 that it would acquire AI startup Manus, aiming to expand its AI capabilities and integrate Manus's autonomous agent technology into products across its platforms, including the Meta AI assistant. Manus was founded in China before moving its headquarters to Singapore. Chinese officials have reportedly been scrutinizing the $2 billion acquisition for potential violations of technology controls.

Meta's Manus AI agent arrives on your desktop

Manus's new desktop app can read, edit, and act on files and applications directly on a user's machine. The launch puts Meta's AI agent ambitions in direct competition with the open-source tool that has dominated the conversation this week. OpenClaw arrived on the internet last month like a weather system. Within days of its release under an MIT licence, it had been downloaded millions of times, dissected in thousands of tutorials, and endorsed by Jensen Huang as "definitely the next ChatGPT." Its appeal is simple: it is a free, locally running AI agent that can browse the web, write code, manage files, and execute multi-step tasks on your computer without sending everything to a cloud server. It is, in the language of the current moment, agentic, and it is free. Manus, the AI agent startup that Meta acquired at the end of the last year, launched its response on March 16, 2026. A new desktop application called My Computer is now available to all macOS and Windows users, bringing Manus's agent directly onto users' personal devices. Through My Computer, the agent can read, analyse, and edit local files, launch and control applications, and execute multi-step tasks, including coding tasks, without the user having to upload anything to a server. Manus's previous iteration operated largely in the cloud: you gave it a task, it worked on a remote server, and it returned results. That model has real advantages in terms of compute and consistency, but it has one significant disadvantage relative to OpenClaw: it is not free, and it does not sit on your machine. My Computer is an attempt to close both gaps, while maintaining what Manus says is a more polished and capable agent underneath. According to the company, My Computer allows the Manus agent to organise files, build coding projects, and control applications on the local device, tasks that previously required either technical skill or a cloud upload. The company cited organising "thousands of internal images" as one example use case. The agent can create applications from within the desktop environment and interact with software already installed on the machine. The key architectural difference between Manus and OpenClaw is the model layer beneath the agent. OpenClaw is open-source and can be run with a variety of underlying language models; its quality depends heavily on which model the user connects to it and how they configure it. Manus runs on Meta's own proprietary model stack, which the company says provides a more consistent and capable base, at the cost of a subscription fee. For users who have found OpenClaw's setup process intimidating or its outputs inconsistent, Manus is pitching itself as the polished commercial alternative: the tool that does the same thing, but works reliably out of the box. For users who want free and configurable, OpenClaw is not going anywhere. The Manus launch is one piece of a broader pattern at Meta around autonomous AI agents. According to information surfacing from the company's internal development work, Meta AI is preparing to integrate its Avocado model family, the Manus agent capability, and direct OpenClaw compatibility, an acknowledgement that open-source agent frameworks are now infrastructure that any competitive AI product needs to speak to. The desktop agent market is becoming genuinely competitive. Apple has been extending its on-device intelligence framework; Microsoft is deepening Copilot's integration with the Windows file system; Google is building agentic capabilities into Gemini. Each of these players has a different structural advantage, hardware, operating system access, search data, that Manus and Meta do not have. What Manus does have is a head start in cross-platform, task-oriented agency, and the resources of the world's largest social network behind it. Whether users who are comfortable with OpenClaw's configuration complexity will pay for a Manus subscription, and whether users who are not comfortable with it will trust a Meta product running on their local machine, are the questions the market will answer over the coming months.

Meta's Manus launches 'My Computer' to turn your Mac into an AI agent - 9to5Mac

AI startup Manus has released its answer to OpenClaw and Perplexity's Personal Computer. The similarly dubbed "My Computer" system runs on your Mac or PC, turning your machine into a personal AI agent. Manus originally started as an independent AI firm before being acquired by Meta at the end of last year. (Meta also recently acquired another OpenClaw-adjacent project: MoltBook, the social media site for AI.) Now the company is out with a desktop app that lets Manus AI "manage your local files, execute commands, and interact directly with your workspace to automate any workflow." Meet My Computer, the core capability of the new Manus Desktop application. It brings Manus out of the cloud and onto your computer, allowing it to work directly with your local files, tools, and applications. Through the Manus Desktop app, Manus executes command line instructions (CLI) in your computer's terminal. This allows it to read, analyze, and edit local files, as well as launch and control your local applications. As an example of what the system can do, Manus describes two scenarios involving tedious busy work: Consider a florist with thousands of unsorted photos on her computer: bouquets, potted plants, customer shots and more all in a single disorganized folder. She can simply tell Manus to "organize my flower shop photos." Manus then scans the files, identifies the content of each image, creates categorized subfolders, and sorts every photo accordingly. In minutes, a clean, structured asset library emerges from the chaos. Or imagine an accountant who needs to rename hundreds of invoices to a standard format. A task that would take an entire afternoon by hand, Manus can complete in minutes with a few terminal commands. Manus has released its new desktop app for Apple Silicon-based Macs. You can learn much more about the system here.