After the Chinese government cracked down on gaming and crypto mining a few years ago, killing the early Chinese version of NVIDIA's hope, Bitmain, The regulation of Meta's acquisition of Manus might be the second biggest blow to China's AI industry, and in the long run, the impact could be even greater. This regulation sends a clear message to Chinese startup teams: Even if your users aren't in China and your team moves overseas, as long as I can find your weak spot, you're still under my control. For teams, the approach moving forward is simple: China's market stays in China, overseas markets stay overseas. For overseas markets, set up a fully overseas structure from the start, with founders being entirely foreign nationals (they can be of Chinese descent). Use Chinese developers as outsourced labor if needed, or not at all. For the domestic market, stick to a fully domestic structure. Still not enough? Then stay low-key, take cues from the crypto world (in fact, as early players in the crypto space, the Manus team’s move overseas was inspired by common crypto strategies, but unfortunately, it wasn’t thorough enough). From this perspective, this might actually be good news for the crypto world. (Bitmain launched the BM1680 / BM1682 back in 2018, using mining profits to create the world's earliest dedicated inference chips. However, the crackdown on mining severely drained resources for chip development.)