China And Japan Are Tightening Control Over Their AI Talent Pipelines
China's regulators this week ordered MetaMETA to unwind its $2B acquisition of Manus, an AI agent startup with Chinese founders, while Tokyo Electron quietly cut ties with a senior executive secretly linked to rival Chinese chip companies.
The two events share the same underlying logic: both Beijing and Tokyo are tightening control over who gets access to their most strategically important technology talent.
Tokyo Electron holds ~90% of global market share for track systems, the equipment that applies photoresist during chip lithography, supplying TSMCTSM, SamsungSSNLF, and IntelINTC.
Jay Chen built that China business from near-zero after joining Tokyo Electron in 1997 and ran it for nearly three decades.
The Financial Times reported that Tokyo Electron discovered in late 2024 that Chen's family held stakes in Suzhou WST Semiconductor Technology and Britech Semiconductor Equipment, both of which were building tools that compete directly with Tokyo Electron's core products.
A 2023 letter to prospective Britech investors, reviewed by the FT, stated that Chen's position at Tokyo Electron "can bring various resources and benefits to Britech, including support from the industry and local governments."
Tokyo Electron replaced Chen in February 2025 and confirmed it no longer works with WST.
Akira Igata, head of the economic security lab at the University of Tokyo, framed the episode as a sector-wide warning: "Companies that hope to survive and grow over the long term must take economic security risks seriously."
On the other side of the Pacific, China's National Development and Reform Commission — the ministry that oversees economic planning and AI policy — issued its Manus ruling without detailed explanation.
Manus had crossed $100M in annual recurring revenue before Meta announced the $2B deal in December 2025, and its AI agents run on third-party models including Anthropic's Claude, making it a ready-built platform Meta could embed into Instagram and WhatsApp without needing to develop the underlying model itself.
Manus had relocated from China to Singapore in mid-2025, a move designed to sidestep both Washington and Beijing regulations, but Chinese authorities restricted Manus executives from leaving China earlier this year as part of an effort to discourage Chinese AI founders from moving operations offshore.
Jianggan Li, CEO of Singapore consultancy Momentum Works, told the New York Times the ruling "will make it increasingly hard for Chinese AI founders who started in China to sit on both sides or switch to the other side."
The message to Chinese AI founders is blunt: pick a market, because Beijing is no longer comfortable letting companies straddle both sides.