China's OpenClaw craze reveals AI ambition beyond the 'raising a lobster' consumer trend

There's Method to China's OpenClaw Madness

Weeks into the craze, nobody quite knows what to make of the OpenClaw mania sweeping China, marked by viral photos of retirees lining up for installation events and users gathering in red claw hats. The queues and cosplay inspired by the "raising a lobster" trend make for irresistible China clickbait. But the West is fixating on the least important part of the story. As a consumer craze, OpenClaw, the AI agent designed to do tasks on a user's behalf, will likely burn out. Without some developer background, it's too glitchy and technically awkward for true mainstream adoption, not to mention the cybersecurity risks. Even so, the fad could leave China's AI industry with something far more valuable: more token demand, more real-world experimentation, and more live training data for open-source models trying to catch US rivals. Much of the narrative has centered on what the madness says about Chinese consumers' appetite for AI, and whether that enthusiasm could tilt the broader -- and arguably more consequential -- diffusion race. Even Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw who recently joined OpenAI, has suggested that the US can learn from China's rapid AI adoption. But already, some of the initial excitement for lobster husbandry has waned. The cottage industry that sprung up to help users install the tool has moved on to making money helping people remove it, or clean up the mess it left behind, like recovering accidentally deleted files. Much of the hype was pure fear of missing out. The long lines and installation ads taking over social media were not proof of seamless consumer demand, but evidence that OpenClaw is still a techie tool that ordinary people need help figuring out how to use. Yet it arrived at exactly the right moment for China's AI sector. After months of brutal price wars, it gave model builders a reason to charge more for tokens, the basic units of AI processing. Agents burn through far more of them than chatbots do. OpenRouter rankings show Chinese models overtaking US rivals in token consumption during the OpenClaw boom. (The widely cited data represents only a fraction of global token usage, but it is influential precisely because so little of this market is transparent). China last week also standardized the translation of token as ciyuan - an intentional reference to its currency and a telling signal of how it wants to shape the standards of this market. The opportunity goes beyond token sales, especially as Chinese AI companies have spent much of the past year in a race to the bottom, slashing prices to win users. OpenClaw offers something more: messy, real-world training. The more agents are turned loose to navigate actual tasks, the more feedback these AI systems receive about how to reason beyond just meeting standardized benchmarks. Open-source models have trailed proprietary ones in user growth, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Mandeep Singh and Robert Biggar noted, but "integration with OpenClaw could help them narrow the lead." In other words, OpenClaw can help the broader Chinese AI stack close the gap. It also gives China's wider tech sector a new catalyst for growth, expanding the contest from just who has the best model to who can embed this technology most seamlessly. Even if consumers lose interest in personal agentic AI -- software that does more than chat and actually takes action -- that may be beside the point. Enterprise adoption is where the economics become meaningful and the strategic stakes get real. This all helps make sense of Beijing's mixed signals. Officials have warned about cybersecurity risks and told employees at state-backed agencies not to use the tool. At the same time, this technology is a major part of the government's AI Plus initiative, which aims for AI agents and smart devices to become nearly ubiquitous by 2030. So while Beijing preaches caution, local governments are doing what they usually do: competing with each other by rolling out subsidies and incentives to attract OpenClaw developers and companies deploying AI agents. Sign up for the Bloomberg Opinion bundle Sign up for the Bloomberg Opinion bundle Sign up for the Bloomberg Opinion bundle Get Matt Levine's Money Stuff, John Authers' Points of Return and Jessica Karl's Opinion Today. Get Matt Levine's Money Stuff, John Authers' Points of Return and Jessica Karl's Opinion Today. Get Matt Levine's Money Stuff, John Authers' Points of Return and Jessica Karl's Opinion Today. Plus Signed UpPlus Sign UpPlus Sign Up By continuing, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. The risks are still enormous. The more useful an AI agent becomes, the more access it needs, and the more damage it can inflict. Greater permissions mean more chances to leak data, expose systems or break things. OpenClaw agents can also be "guilt-tripped into self-sabotage," a reminder researchers are finding new ways for this software to fail as fast as it grows. And that's not to mention the labor market implications of having AI agents replacing workers. It may seem like AI adoption is red hot in China, but the frenzy says more about the strategic value of letting millions of users stress test a new class of software at scale. The backlash is also quieter when it brushes against Beijing's priorities (though that could change if, as some have pointed out, OpenClaw can scale the Great Firewall). The fad may fade. But if OpenClaw helps entrench domestic token demand, train open-source models in the mess of the real world and push companies and governments to build around agents, China will have come away with something far more important than a viral moment. More From Bloomberg Opinion: * Japanese X Is America's Favorite Internet Space: Gearoid Reidy * FCC's Router Ban Is the Wrong Tool for the Right Goal: Dave Lee * How the Iran War Could Split the AI Boom in Two: Parmy Olson Want more Bloomberg Opinion? OPIN <GO> . Or you can subscribe to our daily newsletter .

OpenClaw: What China's frenzy says about its AI ambition

"Are you a lobster?" is the first question Wang had for the BBC. He had been so consumed recently by the AI assistant OpenClaw - which in China has earned the name "lobster" - that he wondered if he was talking to AI, rather than a journalist. After being assured I was indeed human, the young IT engineer explained how he had "fallen deep into" AI and, especially, OpenClaw. Driven by encouragement from the very top of China's leadership, the world's second-biggest economy has embraced artificial intelligence, sparking both curiosity and concern. OpenClaw, built by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, is an example of how this is playing out. Because it is built on open-source data and tech, the code is available to those who want to customise it to work with Chinese AI models. And that is a huge advantage, because Western models such as ChatGPT and Claude are not accessible in China. So OpenClaw stirred up a frenzy as more people experimented with its code. Wang was one of them. He did not want to share his full name because of his side gig running an online shop selling digital gadgets on TikTok, which is banned in China. When he first saw what his "lobster" - built on OpenClaw's code and altered for his use - could do, he said he was stunned. Uploading products to the TikTok Shop is a grind: adding images, writing titles and descriptions, setting prices and discounts, signing up for campaigns, and messaging influencers. Usually he can manage about a dozen listings a day. His "lobster", which he was still testing, can do up to 200 in just two minutes, he claimed. "It is scary, but also exciting. My lobster is better than I am at this. It writes better, and can instantly compare my prices with every competitor - something I would never have time to do." OpenClaw had already exploded in the global tech community - Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called it "the next ChatGPT" and its developer Steinberger recently joined OpenAI. But the enthusiasm that turned OpenClaw into something "trendy" was "uniquely Chinese", said Wendy Chang, from the MERICS think-tank. Wang called OpenClaw "the AI era's answer for ordinary people". Chinese tech giants seemed to agree because they were releasing apps built on OpenClaw. From the southern tech hub of Shenzhen to the capital of Beijing, hundreds of people - from secondary school students to retirees - were lining up outside the headquarters of Tencent and Baidu for free customised versions. Many were curious to find out more about the "lobsters". Some users online said they used them to invest in stocks, claiming their "lobsters" analysed the best times to buy and sell, and even did the deed, despite the risk of costly errors. Others said the tools were great for multi-tasking and saving time. Famous comedian and author Li Dan told millions of his followers on Douyin that he was so immersed in OpenClaw that he talked to his lobster in his dreams. Fu Sheng, chief executive of Cheetah Mobile, relentlessly shared how he "raised his lobster" on social media - a phrase users adopted to describe training the assistant for their requirements. China's AI moment has been in the making for some time. When the Chinese app DeepSeek burst onto the AI scene early last year, it seemed to catch a lot of people by surprise. It was also an open-source platform, developed by home-grown engineers from elite Chinese universities. And it came on the back of years of investments in developing crucial technology, including AI - which has only continued in the wake of DeepSeek's success. What DeepSeek showed was the Chinese entrepreneurial appetite for seeking out opportunities in research and innovation, despite curbs on the import of advanced tech. And it also proved how eagerly people were willing to adopt open-source platforms. So the stage was set for OpenClaw. Its popularity did not escape the Chinese government. Several counties and cities provided incentives to encourage entrepreneurs to apply OpenClaw in their businesses - the eastern city of Wuxi offered up to five million yuan ($726,000; £549,000) for manufacturing-related applications, such as robots. "Everyone in China knows that the government sets the pace, and the government tells you where the opportunities are," said Rui Ma, founder of the Tech Buzz China newsletter. "It's practical for most people. That's probably a better plan, to just follow the government directive than to really try to figure it out on your own." Once Beijing signals its priorities, the market follows. In the past few years, tech companies - large and small - have rushed into the AI race, supported by subsidised office space, cash rewards and loans. From manufacturing to transport, healthcare to household electronics, companies are seeking to integrate AI into their products and operations. "That's the spirit of AI Plus," Chang says, referring to China's national strategy to integrate AI across industries. "Take AI, apply it everywhere." The competition is fierce. In what Chinese media have dubbed the "Hundred Model War", more than 100 AI models have emerged since 2023, with only 10 still in contention. Chinese AI platforms still lag behind Western competitors, experts say, though the gap is narrowing. That is why, for Chinese officials, promoting OpenClaw is a strategic move, according to Jenny Xiao. But much of the initial hype has cooled as users begin to reckon with the costs involved - interacting with the agent requires spending tokens - as well as security concerns. Last month, Beijing's cybersecurity authorities warned of serious risks linked to improperly installing and using OpenClaw. A growing number of government agencies have since banned staff from installing the tool. Soon, the trend shifted from offering to install the service to removing it. Such contradiction is not unusual in China's top-down system, Ma says. Local governments often compete for approval from Beijing by ushering in tools that align with what the Communist Party leadership wants, and then pedal back as challenges arise. "It's disorder with control," Ma says, adding that Beijing's intervention doesn't necessarily signal discouragement. For one, AI startups could address a major challenge: youth unemployment rate of more than 16%. Many government incentives tied to OpenClaw - some with subsidies of up to 10 million yuan - mention "one-person companies", or start-ups run by an individual, with the help of AI. "Who's the most likely to build a one-person company? Probably young people who face a tough job market," Xiao says. And the fear of falling behind is acute in China, given the intense competition over jobs. "Some say that in 2026, if you don't 'raise lobsters', you've already lost at the starting line," reads a commentary published by state newspaper People's Daily. "It is genuinely terrifying," said Jason, an IT programmer whose team is only hiring those who have experience using AI tools. "It's mostly people leaving, with very few new hires coming in." Wang agrees that it's a scary time - "everyone could be replaced" - though he doesn't seem overly worried himself. "I probably won't need to work, and this could become my full-time job," he said, referring to his TikTok business. What if the "lobsters" can run their own shops, squeezing him out? "I'll use AI to find another business."

Tencent launches ClawPro enterprise AI agent platform built on OpenClaw

Tencent Holdings has launched ClawPro, an enterprise AI agent management platform built on OpenClaw, the open-source framework that has become the fastest-growing project in GitHub's history and the unlikely centrepiece of a national technology craze in China. The tool, released in public beta by Tencent's cloud division on Thursday, allows businesses to deploy OpenClaw-based AI agents in as little as 10 minutes, with controls for template selection, model switching, token-consumption tracking, and security compliance. During its internal beta, ClawPro was adopted by more than 200 organisations across finance, government, and manufacturing, sectors that require the kind of strict data governance that the open-source version of OpenClaw was never designed to provide. ClawPro is the latest and most commercially significant addition to Tencent's growing suite of OpenClaw products, which now spans individual users, developers, and enterprises. In March, the company released QClaw, a mini-programme that embeds OpenClaw inside WeChat, giving the framework access to the app's 1.3 billion users. It simultaneously launched WorkBuddy, a workplace AI agent tested by more than 2,000 non-technical employees across human resources, administration, and operations, and ClawBot, a WeChat plugin supporting multi-modal interactions. The speed of the rollout reflects Tencent's determination to position WeChat not just as a messaging platform but as the primary interface for the agentic AI wave that is reshaping how software gets used. The object of all this enterprise engineering is a tool created by Peter Steinberger, an Austrian developer who published the first version under the name Clawdbot in November 2025. The software, built to let large language models operate computers, call tools, and execute tasks autonomously, was renamed twice in three days in late January 2026, first to Moltbot after Anthropic raised trademark concerns over the phonetic similarity to "Claude," then to OpenClaw because Steinberger found Moltbot "never quite rolled off the tongue." In February, he announced he would be joining OpenAI and transferring the project to an open-source foundation. By that point, the project had already passed React to become the most-starred software repository on GitHub, a record it reached in 60 days that took React more than a decade. As of late March, OpenClaw had 335,000 GitHub stars, 27 million monthly visitors, 2 million active users, and more than 13,700 community-built skills on its ClawHub marketplace. In China, the adoption curve has been extraordinary. The country now has more OpenClaw users than any other, roughly double the activity of the United States according to analysis by SecurityScorecard. The phenomenon has been given a name: "raise a lobster," after OpenClaw's crustacean logo and mascot, which Steinberger chose because a lobster sheds its shell to grow. Tencent organised public installation sessions in Shenzhen that drew retirees and students. Baidu held similar events in Beijing. A cottage industry of technicians began charging 500 yuan, around $72, for on-site installations. Nvidia's Jensen Huang told CNBC that OpenClaw was "definitely the next ChatGPT." The Chinese state media apparatus amplified the enthusiasm. "Claw-powered" one-person companies became a talking point at the National People's Congress, and local governments began offering grants to startups building applications on the framework. The enthusiasm collided with reality almost immediately. In March, China's National Computer Emergency Response Team warned that OpenClaw had "extremely weak default security configuration" and that attackers could exploit the tool by embedding malicious instructions in web pages or distributing poisoned plugins. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's National Vulnerability Database published formal security guidelines urging users to run only the latest version, minimise internet exposure, and grant the agent the minimum permissions necessary. State-owned enterprises and government agencies, including the country's largest banks, received notices warning them against installing OpenClaw on office devices. Several were instructed to report existing installations for security review and possible removal. Bloomberg reported that China moved to curb OpenClaw use at banks and state agencies, a striking reversal for a tool the government had been celebrating weeks earlier. Tencent's own relationship with OpenClaw has not been without friction. On 11 March, Tencent Cloud launched SkillHub, a Chinese-localised mirror of OpenClaw's ClawHub marketplace, by scraping more than 13,000 skills from the original registry. The bulk scraping pushed Steinberger's server costs into five digits and caused slowdowns on official servers. He complained publicly on X. Five days later, Tencent Cloud and Tencent AI appeared on OpenClaw's official sponsor list, providing lightweight application servers for one-click deployment. The episode encapsulated a dynamic familiar in Chinese tech: a European project supplies the foundational innovation, Chinese companies scale it faster than anyone else, and the relationship between creator and commercialiser oscillates between parasitism and partnership. The competitive context is fierce. Alibaba, which holds a 35.8 per cent share of China's AI cloud market compared with Tencent's smaller position, integrated its Qwen AI assistant across Taobao, Tmall, Alipay, and other consumer platforms, reaching 300 million monthly active users by early 2026 and delivering roughly 140 million first-time AI shopping experiences during a Chinese New Year promotional campaign. ByteDance is pursuing platform independence through Douyin and a state-media partnership. Baidu's AI-powered business now accounts for 43 per cent of its core revenue, up from 26 per cent a year ago. Tencent's strategy depends on WeChat's unmatched distribution, its 1.3 billion users, and the bet that AI agents will become features of existing super-apps rather than standalone products. The company spent 18 billion yuan on AI products in 2025 and plans to double that in 2026. ClawPro is the piece of that strategy designed to generate cloud revenue. Enterprise AI agent deployments require infrastructure, compute, model hosting, security layers, and compliance tooling, all of which Tencent can bill for even when the underlying agent framework is free. The 200 organisations that trialled ClawPro during its internal beta represent the beginning of a conversion funnel: take the enthusiasm for a consumer phenomenon, channel it through enterprise-grade tooling, and extract recurring cloud revenue from the result. It is the same playbook that European cloud companies have used to monetise open-source software, applied at a scale and speed that only the Chinese tech ecosystem can achieve. The security concerns are not trivial. OpenClaw, by design, grants AI agents broad access to local files and the ability to communicate with external services. In an enterprise context, a misconfigured agent could exfiltrate sensitive documents, execute unauthorised transactions, or expose internal systems to prompt-injection attacks. The tension between the open-source community's permissive defaults and the compliance requirements of banks, government agencies, and manufacturers is precisely the gap that ClawPro is designed to fill. Whether Tencent's security layer is robust enough to satisfy Chinese regulators, who have already demonstrated their willingness to restrict the tool entirely, will determine whether the year of governed AI produces governed AI agents or merely governed press releases about them. The broader significance of the OpenClaw phenomenon is what it reveals about the geography of AI adoption. The tool was built by a single developer in Austria, renamed after a trademark dispute with an American AI company, transferred to an open-source foundation after its creator joined OpenAI, and then adopted at a velocity in China that dwarfs anything that has happened in the West. The country that produced DeepSeek, the AI model that rattled Silicon Valley's assumption that scale required American infrastructure, is now demonstrating that it can also adopt, adapt, and commercialise foreign AI tools faster than the markets that created them. Tencent's ClawPro is, in that sense, less a product launch than a proof of concept for a pattern that will repeat: the open-source AI stack is global, but the speed of enterprise adoption is determined by the ecosystems that can distribute it. In China, that ecosystem runs through WeChat, and WeChat runs through Tencent.

Why is OpenClaw so popular in China?

Subsidies, cheap AI, and job anxiety explain the lobster craze China has taken to OpenClaw in a way no other country has. People queue outside Baidu and Tencent offices to get the tool installed on their laptops. Local governments are handing out grants to startups building products on top of it. A software engineer in Beijing told MIT Technology Review that his 77-year-old father asked him to set up a "lobster" -- Chinese users' nickname for the tool, after its logo. In the US and EU, adoption has been far quieter. That contrast isn't accidental, and understanding it tells you something useful about how agentic AI actually spreads. How does OpenClaw work? OpenClaw is a free, open-source AI agent developed by Austrian programmer Peter Steinberger and first released in November 2025. It isn't an AI model itself. You connect it to the Large Language Model (LLM) of your choice, and OpenClaw handles the execution: it breaks a goal into steps, connects to tools like your email or calendar, and keeps track of what it's already done. Tell it to research suppliers, draft outreach emails, and log the results, and it handles all of that without you managing each step. By early March 2026, the project had surpassed 248,000 GitHub stars, overtaking React and Linux in the starred list, according to research by Guolian Minsheng Securities. Why is OpenClaw popular in China? Several things aligned for OpenClaw in China, allowing the framework to gain widespread popularity despite the government's concern about security issues. Let's try to understand why, before we talk about why it hasn't gotten the same reception in the EU or the USA. Local governments are offering their support Beijing's AI strategy, unveiled last summer, targets AI deployment across 90% of industries and throughout society by 2030. That gave local governments and state-backed companies a clear incentive to find visible AI adoption stories fast. When OpenClaw interest picked up in early 2026, Shenzhen's Longgang district announced free computing credits and cash rewards for OpenClaw projects. Wuxi and other cities followed with subsidies worth up to one million yuan for standout contributors, according to Sixth Tone. Tencent organized public installation sessions in Shenzhen that drew retirees and students; Baidu held similar events in Beijing. As The Diplomat reported, local governments and major tech companies were the deliberate architects of this momentum, timing their moves to signals from March's Two Sessions political conference. China has surpassed the US in OpenClaw usage, according to American cybersecurity firm SecurityScorecard, but a meaningful portion of that adoption was institutionally coordinated rather than independently driven. Running costs are much lower OpenClaw's practical barrier in most markets is what it costs to run. The agent queries a large language model continuously, and those API costs accumulate quickly. For most Western users, that means paying OpenAI or Anthropic rates. Chinese users have a cheaper alternative. Domestic AI labs have released capable open-source models at a fraction of the price of their US counterparts. According to OpenRouter data cited by CNBC, the three most-used models among OpenClaw users on its marketplace last month were all Chinese, with combined usage double that of the leading Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude models. Lower inference costs make it practical for far more people to run the agent on an ongoing basis. Job anxiety is driving adoption China's enthusiasm for OpenClaw isn't simply excitement about new technology. A May 2025 survey by Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business found 85.5% of nearly 12,000 Chinese respondents worried about how AI could affect their jobs. Youth unemployment hovered between 15% and 19% in 2025, and the hashtag #AIAnxiety had drawn around 2.6 million views on RedNote, per Rest of World. The idea of a "one-person company" has taken hold as a result: a single person using an AI agent to handle admin, marketing, and communications without additional staff. "Human employees need rest, but OpenClaw can run 24/7," user Wang Xiaoyan told CNBC. For workers anxious about redundancy, learning the tool feels like a hedge. Researchers are more cautious. Jiang Han, a senior researcher at Beijing think tank Pangoal, told Sixth Tone that for most people, OpenClaw is still more of a toy for tech enthusiasts than a practical business tool. Setup is difficult for non-technical users, costs add up, and the agent can cause real damage if given unchecked access to systems. Why it hasn't caught on the same way in the EU or US GDPR, CCPA, and equivalent regulations make it legally awkward to hand an AI agent broad access to email, calendars, and messaging apps, which is precisely what OpenClaw needs. There's no institutional push comparable to China's government-coordinated rollout, and until recently, the cheapest capable models were American, making continuous use expensive. Chinese official media cited privacy regulations and API costs as the main reasons the West saw no similar craze, as The Diplomat noted. That explains part of the gap. It doesn't account for the fact that China's adoption was actively manufactured from the top down, which most countries haven't attempted. There are still hurdles The central government has barred state-owned enterprises, banks, and government agencies from running OpenClaw on office computers, citing security risks that China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology flagged in February 2026. Cybersecurity researchers have documented vulnerabilities, including prompt injection attacks and data exfiltration through third-party integrations. Ordinary users have raised concerns, too. "It's hard for us regular people to know what access we have given it and what it has taken," new user Gong Zheng told CNBC. We'd echo that concern for anyone evaluating agentic AI tools. The enthusiasm around OpenClaw is real, but so are the risks, and they don't disappear because a local government is offering subsidies to use it.

There's method to China's OpenClaw madness

Weeks into the craze, nobody quite knows what to make of the OpenClaw mania sweeping China, marked by viral photos of retirees lining up for installation events and users gathering in red claw hats. The queues and cosplay inspired by the "raising a lobster" trend make for irresistible China clickbait. But the West is fixating on the least important part of the story. As a consumer craze, OpenClaw, the AI agent designed to do tasks on a user's behalf, will likely burn out. Without some developer background, it's too glitchy and technically awkward for true mainstream adoption, not to mention the cybersecurity risks. Even so, the fad could leave China's AI industry with something far more valuable: more token demand, more real-world experimentation and more live training data for open-source models trying to catch U.S. rivals.