Under the OpenClaw Trend, Meta's Manus Launches Desktop Application to Bring Its AI Agents to Personal Devices

The AI startup Manus, recently acquired by Meta, launched a new desktop application on Monday that allows its AI agents to be deployed directly on personal laptops.

The company’s general-purpose AI agents can perform complex multi-step tasks, previously only running in the cloud and typically accessed via web interfaces.

With the new Manus Desktop app, a feature called “My Computer” enables AI agents to directly operate on local files, tools, and applications on the user’s device.

This expansion brings Meta and Manus’s AI agents closer to OpenClaw—a popular open-source AI agent that also supports downloading and running locally on user devices.

OpenClaw was launched late last year by Austrian software developer Peter Steinberger, sparking a wave of interest in AI agents. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called OpenClaw “the next ChatGPT.”

Steinberger has been hired by OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, which is one of Meta’s main competitors in AI.

Unlike OpenClaw, which is open-source and licensed under the MIT license for free, Manus primarily offers its services through a paid subscription model.

According to Manus, the “My Computer” feature allows AI agents to read, analyze, edit files, and launch or control applications on the device.

The company gave an example: users can instruct Manus to organize thousands of internal images on their hard drive. Besides file management, “My Computer” is also compatible with programming applications, enabling the creation of an app within minutes.

These features will be integrated into Manus’s existing capabilities, which already support connections to Google Calendar, Gmail, and various third-party platforms.

While such features have broad potential, experts also point out that granting AI agents like OpenClaw access to local devices could pose security and privacy risks.

Manus stated in its announcement that the “My Computer” feature will give users “absolute control,” requiring explicit user authorization before executing tasks, including options for single-use permission for review or always allowing trusted repeated operations.

Meta announced the acquisition of AI startup Manus on December 29, 2025, aiming to expand its AI capabilities and integrate Manus’s autonomous AI technology into its various products, including the Meta AI assistant.