China's Manus AI announced on Tuesday a strategic partnership with the team behind tech giant Alibaba's Qwen AI models, a move that could bolster the artificial intelligence start-up's roll-out of what it called the world's first general AI agent.

China's Manus AI, a viral autonomous agent developed by Tencent-backed startup The Butterfly Effect, is partnering with Alibaba's Qwen team to create a localized version as it gains global attention and draws comparisons to DeepSeek.

Manus will engage in strategic cooperation with Alibaba’s Qwen team “to meet the needs of Chinese users”, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. The two companies are w