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.

The creator of Chinese general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) agent Manus is working with Alibaba Group Holding's large language model (LLM) team to develop a Chinese version of the application,