MC.66: Manus and the (AI) clone war

Hey everyone,

Within just a few days of its release, someone was able to clone Manus simply by asking Manus to do so.

While it is no secret that the most hyped service right now is a clever orchestration of tools, extensions, and VMs powered by Claude 3.5, it was an aha moment: As AI has become so proficient at writing code, no application is safe from being cloned in just a few clicks.

Over the past few months, we have witnessed two notable trends:

• Open-source models achieving similar benchmark results to private models within days of their release, often by cloning the techniques shared by Deepseek.

• Feature-wise copies of popular UIs and services, almost matching their originals.

Both trends typically occur within just a few days after any major release.

However, the incident with Manus serves as a significant wake-up call.

Beyond the intellectual and legal challenges—such as defining what constitutes IP theft when the foundation is scraping the entire internet (and sometimes e-book torrents)—it raises a fundamental question about where the value lies in software.

And because software is increasingly integral to our economy, it begs the question of value on a broader scale. The copycat strategy has been around forever, but the combination of speed, low cost, and high quality of these copies is truly astonishing.

Reverse engineering anything with AI brute force will soon become just a matter of how cheaply you can acquire those tokens.

From Alter's perspective, we are not concerned about clones or competitors being inspired by our features. After all, we are all building on the shoulders of giants.

But we recognize that in a world where AI actors strive to gather as much data as possible and even take control of your machine in exchange for increased productivity, there is one thing you can’t brute force with tokens: the trust between users and the people building the software.

Cheers, Olivier

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Until next Thursday 🎉