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.

Alibaba's Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) and the emerging AI agent Manus have recently announced a strategic partnership, generating buzz across the artificial intelligence sector. This collaboration seeks to combine their expertise in large-scale language models and computational platforms specifically catered to the Chinese market.

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.