China’s Manus AI has unveiled a text-to-video generator it says can transform “prompts into complete stories — structured, sequenced, and ready to watch. With a single prompt, Manus plans each scene, crafts the visuals, and animates your vision,” the company announced last week. Manus generated buzz in March for its agentic approach to AI, and now it is putting that autonomous technology to work on generative AI, promising story generation within minutes. Last month, the firm that developed Manus, Butterfly Effect, reportedly secured $75 million in funding led by U.S.-based Benchmark for a nearly $500 million valuation.

Using the new Manus video generator, “from storyboard creation to concept visualization — your ideas become living videos in minutes,” the company posted on X.

Paid subscribers on Manus’ Basic, Plus and Pro tiers will get early access to the new feature before it rolls out “for free for everyone,” writes Bloomberg, which says the Chinese company is looking to compete against U.S. technologies including Runway, Sora from OpenAI, and Google’s Veo, as well as the UK-based Synthesia.

Manus is seeking to distinguish its video generator by pitching it “as a part of a larger workflow, one that can incorporate those images into bigger projects,” TechRadar writes. “Manus doesn’t just generate images. It understands your intent, plans a solution, and knows how to effectively use image generation along with other tools to accomplish your task.”

MIT Technology Review describes AI agents as “systems that are less about responding to users’ queries and more about autonomously accomplishing things for them” and notes they aren’t large language models, but are “built on top of them, using a workflow-based structure.”

Manus debuted in March, and in May TechRadar put the tech through its paces, asking for it to come up with a name, logo, menu and more for a food truck, judging the results impressive — not just the image quality but the cohesion with which images were integrated into larger tasks. “Everything felt modular and adaptive,” putting “Manus in a different category than most visual AIs,” per TechRadar.

China, MIT Tech Review posits, “could take the lead on building these kinds of agents” due to “the country’s tightly integrated app ecosystems, rapid product cycles, and digitally fluent user base,” factors potentially paving the way “for embedding AI into daily life.”

“While AI agents require a certain amount of hand-holding,” Bloomberg quotes Manus co-founder and Chief Scientist Ji Yichao saying “its product is ‘truly autonomous,’” which could have interesting implications for video generation.