Significance The anterior intraparietal area (AIP) is a crucial hub in the observed manipulative action (OMA) network of primates. While macaques observe manipulative action videos, their AIP neuronal activity robustly encodes first the viewpoint from which the action is observed, then the actor’s body posture, and finally the observed-action identity. Despite the lack of fully invariant OMA-selective single neurons, OMA exemplars could be decoded accurately from the activity of a set of units that maintain stable OMA selectivity despite rescaling their firing rate across formats. We propose that by integrating signals multiplicatively about others’ action and their visual format, the AIP can provide a stable readout of OMA identity at the population level.