Manus’s Cue aims to turn personal AI into a persistent digital proxy that can communicate, collaborate and spend money independently , raising difficult questions about authority and accountability.
Manus has pushed its personal AI assistant Cue into a more ambitious category: a tool that is meant not merely to answer prompts, but to act with an identity of its own. According to the company’s launch material and third-party explainers, each agent can be given an independent email address, telephone number, digital wallet and dedicated computer, so it can keep working even after the user logs out. That design turns a long-running technical question into a product proposition: if an AI is going to send messages, take calls and spend money, whose authority does it operate under?
The concept is not abstract. Cue was introduced alongside Manus 2.0 on 28 September 2026, and coverage from several product explainers describes it as a standalone personal-agent app rather than a simple add-on. The idea is that an agent can maintain its own working state, participate in group collaboration and continue tasks autonomously. In practical terms, Manus is attempting to move personal AI from a temporary helper to a persistent digital proxy. According to tool directories and product notes, Cue has been offered in invite-based early access, with some listings also describing it as free during the initial rollout.
That pitch is clear, but the operational reality appears more uneven. Independent summaries of the app say the phone function varies by country, while the wallet and communications features are tied to regional availability and external infrastructure. Other reports note that the product is still young enough that evidence on reliability, governance and accountability remains limited. In other words, the idea is concrete, but the rules that would make it broadly usable are still incomplete.
Manus is also returning to a much more crowded market than the one it first entered. The company had earlier gained attention for its general-purpose agent ambitions, and it has since been working to re-establish momentum with fresh capital and a wider product strategy. At the same time, the wider AI agent space has become far more competitive, with multiple vendors now building tools that can draft, schedule, search, transact and coordinate on the user’s behalf. That makes Cue less a novelty than part of a wider race to define what personal AI should become.
The deeper issue is governance. Cue’s architecture places authority, memory, spending and impersonation inside a single interface, which is precisely why it is technically interesting and commercially risky. If an agent has its own phone number and wallet, then the system must also answer who granted those permissions, what limits apply, and who bears responsibility when something goes wrong. The more autonomous the agent becomes, the more important those boundaries become.
That tension is what makes Cue notable. It is not simply another chat-style assistant with a prettier interface. It is a test of whether personal AI can be made persistent enough to be useful without becoming so loosely governed that users hesitate to trust it. Manus is effectively arguing that the answer lies in giving agents their own operational identity. Whether that identity becomes a practical standard, however, will depend on how well the product can handle regional access, collaboration, payment controls and the ordinary messiness of real-world use.
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