Manus Gave Its AI Agents a Wallet. That Is Not Consolidation Yet
Manus's new Cue app hands each AI agent its own email address, phone number, wallet and computer. It sounds like the ultimate fewer-apps pitch. We think it is a new account to supervise, not a tool you get to delete, and the launch does not yet say how that supervision works.
Manus launched Manus 2.0 on Monday, September 28, and with it Cue, a standalone app for personal agents. According to The Next Web, each agent gets its own email, phone number, wallet and computer, and can pay within a budget the user sets. Ten days later, on October 8, Manus's parent company announced it had raised more than $500 million, led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital. TechCrunch reports the valuation was not disclosed.
Why a solo operator should care
If you run a business alone, the tool-sprawl problem is real: we put the cost of app-switching at roughly nine percent of work time, based on research from Harvard Business Review. An agent that handles email, calls, bookings and payments is the obvious answer to that. One thing replaces five logins.
But look at what Cue actually adds. It does not remove your inbox, your calendar or your bank. It adds a second inbox, a second phone number and a second wallet, all belonging to software, and all of which you now have to keep funded, watch and trust. That is consolidation of the work, and expansion of the things you are responsible for.
The fair objection
The best argument for Cue is that a separate identity is safer than giving an agent your own logins. If the agent has its own wallet with a capped budget, the worst case is bounded. That is a good design instinct, and it beats pasting your passwords into a chatbot.
The trouble is that the launch coverage does not show the bound holds. RuntimeWire reports that Manus's announcement does not explain how users approve individual transactions, restrict the agent's use of its email or phone, or review its actions afterwards. The Next Web adds that it does not address how budgets are enforced or what happens after an unauthorised payment. Both outlets note that the capabilities are Manus's own claims, not independently demonstrated.
What we would do
Cue is in early access, free with an invite code, so it is cheap to look at and expensive to trust early. If you get in, test it with a tiny budget and a throwaway task before it touches a client or a real card. The questions that decide whether it saves you time are boring ones: who approves a payment, where the log lives, and how fast you can switch it off.
If your actual goal is fewer subscriptions rather than a new kind of account, a general-purpose agent that produces slides, pages and documents from one credit balance is a different and less risky trade. We cover where that works, and where it does not, in our Runable review.
The test for any agent product is not what it can do on launch day. It is whether you can see and stop what it did on your behalf. Manus has yet to show us that.
Sources checked October 10, 2026. Product capabilities and the unanswered questions above come from the cited reports of Manus's announcement. We have not used Cue.