What's the one thing OpenAI and Anthropic have that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't? Subscription revenue. 📰

Meta’s latest move says more about its business model than its product roadmap.

With Manus AI, a $2B+ AI agent acquisition that was already doing significant subscription revenue, Zuckerberg didn’t just buy technology—he bought a proven SaaS engine he can plug directly into Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Meta AI and own a subscription model.

Now Meta is testing premium subscriptions across all its flagship apps: “pro” AI features, advanced creation tools, workflow automation, and power-user utilities on top of the existing free social graph.

Manus will be integrated into those experiences while still sold as a standalone subscription for businesses, giving Meta both B2C and B2B recurring revenue out of the same agent stack.

Why this matters strategically:

OpenAI and Anthropic were born with subscription and API revenue at the core (ChatGPT Plus, enterprise seats, API usage), not advertising.
Meta was born as an advertising machine and is now trying to retrofit a subscription business on top of billions of users.
High-compute AI features (agents, video generation, automation) are too expensive to fund purely with ads - paywalls and tiers are the cleanest way to make that unit economics work at scale.
So Manus is Meta’s shortcut: instead of slowly building a subscription culture from scratch, Zuckerberg is using a native “AI agent SaaS” business to:

Monetize beyond impressions and clicks
Tie revenue directly to outcomes and productivity, not just attention
Narrow the strategic gap with OpenAI and Anthropic on recurring AI revenue

If you zoom out, this is Meta’s first serious attempt to answer a simple question: in an AI-first world where assistants, not feeds, are the primary interface… how do you make money when you don’t own the subscription relationship?

Zuckerberg’s answer: buy the agent, wire it into the feed, and charge for the work it does across the entire ecosystem. Well played Zuck...right before earnings this coming Wednesday.