OpenClaw fever: why is China rushing to ‘raise a lobster’?

As global concern rises over artificial intelligence and the potential for AI agents to disrupt lives and industries, people in southern China are rushing to embrace the technology even as privacy concerns intensify. On Friday, nearly 1,000 people lined up outside Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings’ Shenzhen headquarters to install OpenClaw – a popular open-source AI agent software – on their computers. The crowd, a mix of amateur developers, retired space engineers, housewives, students and AI enthusiasts, gathered following an invitation from Tencent’s cloud-computing unit, with the company’s engineers installing the software for free. Meanwhile, social media was awash with posts offering the same service for fees ranging from tens to hundreds of yuan. Tencent’s initiative reflects the latest effort from a Chinese tech company to capitalise on surging enthusiasm for OpenClaw, which has spilled beyond the developer community to hobbyists and ordinary users. Mark Yang, a Shanghai-based designer and early OpenClaw adopter, said with the AI assistant it felt like having “virtual staff” that handled assignments and reduced workload. OpenClaw, formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, was developed by Austrian programmer Peter Steinberger and released last year to global fanfare. Last month, Microsoft-backed US frontier AI lab OpenAI acquired the open-source autonomous AI agent. Unlike conventional chatbots that mostly interact with users, OpenClaw – billed as the AI that actually does things – was designed to carry out tasks on users’ computer systems on their behalf. That vision helped it take the world by storm, offering a glimpse of a future where everyone has their own Jarvis, the omniscient AI assistant from Marvel Comics’ Iron Man movie franchise. Adopting OpenClaw has been dubbed “raise the lobster” by Chinese consumers, who are flocking to use it for everything from stock picking and report writing to slide decks, emails and coding. The adoption rush comes despite concerns, as OpenClaw typically requires high-level control of a user’s computer system to function, making it a potential privacy risk. Speaking at a Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that “OpenClaw is the single most important release of software probably ever”. Despite the hype, installing OpenClaw and getting it to run properly was proving challenging for users without advanced technical knowledge, according to Beijing-based software developer Hu Zhicheng. He added that the barrier explained why paid installation services were popular on local social media platforms. Apart from installing OpenClaw, a social media post from Tencent’s cloud unit on Friday said engineers would help set up AI models, connect with third-party services and enable various skills. Many online sessions and offline events have also sprung up across mainland China, from Beijing and Shenzhen to Hangzhou, to share know-how and encourage adoption of OpenClaw. Afra Wang, a writer who covers Chinese tech and is the author of the Substack newsletter Concurrent, went to one such event last month, where she saw first-hand a tremendous interest in OpenClaw among the country’s independent developer community. “Two weeks ago a friend organised an OpenClaw meet-up [in Hangzhou], where so many people showed up that they had to restrict attendance,” Wang said in a post on X on Thursday. “Now he’s hosting another talk in Shenzhen and 900+ people have registered.” Other major Chinese tech companies would now be eyeing the trend, eager to join the bandwagon, after OpenClaw-style AI agents were featured in the government’s annual work report for the first time. “We will promote faster application of new-generation intelligent terminals and AI agents, and encourage large-scale commercial application of AI in key sectors and fields, so as to foster new forms and models of AI-native business,” according to the work report delivered by Premier Li Qiang at the opening of China’s top legislative meeting, the National People’s Congress, in Beijing on Thursday. Last week, smartphone vendors Xiaomi and ZTE-backed Nubia announced the integration of OpenClaw-like capabilities in some of their models. Cloud services providers from ByteDance to Alibaba Group Holding were also offering solutions to have OpenClaw installed on their cloud platforms, aiming to alleviate privacy concerns. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. Among those swept up in the excitement to ‘raise a lobster’ is Fu Sheng. The veteran Chinese tech entrepreneur developed an OpenClaw-based agent named Sanwan while recovering from a skiing accident during the Chinese New Year holiday. Fu spent 14 days developing Sanwan into a reliable 24X7 personal assistant. The AI agent helped him send Chinese New Year greetings to more than 600 friends in four minutes, write and publish social media posts that garnered more than 1 million views while he slept, and handle a range of other tasks. Fu documented the entire process on the website sanwan.ai, which was designed, coded and launched by Sanwan. “When I work with human staff, no one acts immediately [on requests], but [Sanwan] is different, there’s no need to schedule or wait,” Fu said. “Changes come immediately at your command.”

OpenClaw fever: why is China rushing to ‘raise a lobster’?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Chinese consumers are using OpenClaw for everything from stock picking and report writing to slide decks, emails and coding

Chinese consumers are using OpenClaw for everything from stock picking and report writing to slide decks, emails and coding