While Manus is now based in Singapore, it was founded and previously based in China and, as such, has come under the country's regulators.

China has a number of strict laws and regulations around its tech, including controls on their export or sale to foreign firms.

Such regulations, for instance, meant Beijing's approval was needed to secure President Donald Trump's deal to keep TikTok available in the US after its sale by Chinese parent company ByteDance.

It was reported , externalin March that Manus' two co-founders had been prevented from leaving the country amid a review of Meta's acquisition.

"The outstanding team at Manus is now deeply integrated into Meta, running, improving and growing the Manus service and will continue to make it available to the millions of people who enjoy it," a Meta spokesperson told the BBC at the time.

Any requirement to unwind the acquisition may, as a result, cause difficulty for Meta.

It also comes amid tensions between the US and China, which have loomed large over the tech industry.

The White House said on Friday it would work more closely with US AI firms to combat "industrial-scale campaigns" to steal advances in the technology - saying new information showed "foreign entities, principally based in China" were copying US models.

A representative of China's US embassy in Washington DC took issue with "the unjustified suppression of Chinese companies by the US" in response to the memo.

"China is not only the world's factory but is also becoming the world's innovation lab," the representative added.