Tim Bradshaw
speaker
126 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 10 Sep
Tim Bradshaw’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Many of these startups have their ultimate sort of parent company incorporated in the US, often in the state of Delaware, which is kind of tax friendly and makes it easier to raise capital from American investors.
And I think it should also be clear that even if those companies have their main functional headquarters and staff in London,
more often than not, the majority of their capital is still coming from the US.
And so there is a second order question about if these companies do become big, is it the British taxpayer that really benefits from that?
The official reason that China gave on Monday was that it was a foreign investment in a Chinese company that presented national security risks, which is complicated because as far as Manus is concerned, they are officially based in Singapore these days.
But it also comes at a time when there is great tension over AI and national security between Beijing and Washington in both directions.
Washington is very keen that China does not get hold of the latest AI models from Silicon Valley companies and increasingly the chips that power them.
And China is trying its best to nurture its own domestic competitors to that, of which Manus was one.
I think the significance for Beijing for this one is partly to do with AI and partly to do with Singapore.
A number of big Chinese tech companies have tried to relocate their headquarters to Singapore, including Shein, the big retailer.
It's sometimes known as Singapore washing, where Chinese companies try to move out in such a way that makes them more available to foreign partnership and investment.
And China does not like that.
And so there is a sense that Manus is being made an example of here with that.
But I also think at a time when there has been a huge craze in China for OpenClaw, which is another AI agent app, very much like Manus, which was originally developed in Europe for enabling individuals to create new kind of personal AI agents that run on their desktop and carry out a bunch of tasks.
for users.
This is really the new frontier in AI at the moment.
And if Manus was going to be one of the leading parties from a Chinese developer for that, then Beijing probably wants to keep that local.
I don't know that anybody has a very good idea about that yet.
It's going to be a very complicated one.
The scenarios are that Meta either has to find a buyer, like a new entity that will take on Manus, sort of spin it off with new backing.
Showing 81–100 of 126 · page 5 of 7
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