OpenClaw AI craze sweeps China as millions 'raise lobsters' amid security warnings

As OpenClaw enthusiasm grips China, schoolkids and retirees alike raise 'lobsters'

BEIJING, March 19 (Reuters) - Fan Xinquan, a retired electronics worker in Beijing, has recently started raising a "lobster," hoping that the AI agent he has been training can help organise his specialised industry knowledge better than chatbots like DeepSeek. "OpenClaw can actually help you accomplish many practical things," the 60-year-old said at a recent event hosted by AI startup Zhipu to teach people how to use and train the AI agent, which has gone viral in China, with its various local versions earning the "lobster" nickname. In the past month, OpenClaw, which can connect several hardware and software tools and learn from the data produced with much less human intervention than a chatbot, has captured the imaginations of many in China, from retirees looking for side income to AI firms hoping to generate new revenue streams. After first appearing in November, the tool has become one of the fastest-growing projects in the history of GitHub, the world's most widely adopted AI-powered developer platform. The hype over the open-source, agent-controlling bot created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger is the latest example of how a new technology could overhaul the world's second-largest economy through unbridled consumer adoption. "If DeepSeek marked a milestone for open-source large language models, then OpenClaw represents a similar turning point for open-source ⁠agents," said Wei Sun, chief AI analyst at Counterpoint Research. Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab CEO Jensen Huang this week said OpenClaw is "the next ChatGPT" and growing enthusiasm over the technology sent Chinese tech shares up by as much as 22% in recent weeks as companies rolled out a suite of products based on the agent. OPENCLAW DRAWS CHILDREN AND RETIREES Huang Rongsheng, chief architect at Baidu's smart device unit Xiaodu, said at an event on Tuesday that parent group chats for his daughter's primary school class have become overwhelmed by OpenClaw discussions. "My daughter came to me and asked: Dad, I see you raising a lobster every day," he said. "Can I have one too?" Bai Yiyun, another attendee at the Zhipu event, said she hopes to use the agent to start a side hustle during her retirement. "Some people use it to buy lottery tickets or for stock picking, others use it to create money-making apps or open e-commerce shops, but I don't know if it brings them any real profits," she said. Aside from get-rich-quick schemes, many OpenClaw users hope for dramatic boosts in productivity, with some local governments offering subsidies of up to 20 million yuan ($2.8 million) a year for qualifying "one-person companies." "(The OpenClaw frenzy) directly coincides with what the Chinese government wants when it comes to the AI Plus initiative," said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at tech research firm Omdia, referring to a national policy aimed at embedding AI ⁠across the economy. SECURITY RISKS AND TECHNICAL CHALLENGES But the initial wave of enthusiasm could still peter out, especially as token costs accumulate and regulators warn of security vulnerabilities. Zhipu this week raised token prices on its new OpenClaw-optimised AI model by 20%. "Output is extremely low: ordinary people spend tens or hundreds of yuan, burning through a bunch of tokens and in the end, they might only get a pile of useless data," read one post on Rednote, a social media platform, titled "Goodbye OpenClaw." "This is not 'embracing the future,' it's 'being harvested by the future,'" it said. The widespread enthusiasm in Chinese society and industry has also spooked Beijing, with a growing number of Chinese institutions - including government agencies, brokerages and universities - banning employees from installing OpenClaw following regulatory warnings. A ⁠commentary last week published by the state-owned People's Daily, which serves as a mouthpiece for China's ruling Communist Party, urged the government to "firmly maintain the safety bottom line to ensure that innovation does not deviate or derail" with OpenClaw. "Beijing clearly sees AI as strategically important and wants Chinese firms to commercialize quickly," said Rui Ma, founder of the Tech Buzz China newsletter. "But it also wants deployment to stay legible, secure and politically manageable ... the concern is utterly uncontrolled and ⁠chaotic diffusion that could cause harm." Li Hongxue, a data security professional at a finance company, said the contrast between central government warnings and actions by local governments felt "contradictory." "Its development is still unstoppable, but the security capabilities also need to keep up so in that sense, this may also be an opportunity for (my) field," she added. Another issue is whether the agent can smoothly operate across apps and devices that are controlled by a wide range of ⁠companies, which are sometimes in competition with each other. At the Baidu event on Tuesday, an employee used a voice command - sent through a Xiaodu smart device - to order coffee on a McDonald's (MCD.N), opens new tab app, an operation made possible by an OpenClaw agent. Almost two minutes passed before the order was ready for payment. "As you can see, I only gave a simple command, but to complete the whole delivery there is actually a lot of work being done in the background by Xiaodu and the lobster," the Baidu employee said. Reporting by Laurie Chen and Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Miyoung Kim and Thomas Derpinghaus Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Technology Laurie Chen Thomson Reuters Laurie Chen is a China Correspondent at Reuters' Beijing bureau, covering politics and general news. Before joining Reuters, she reported on China for six years at Agence France-Presse and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. She speaks fluent Mandarin. Eduardo Baptista Thomson Reuters Eduardo Baptista is a Senior Correspondent for Reuters based in Beijing, covering China's technology, space, and automotive industries. He has led enterprise and investigative reporting on China's military-linked companies, artificial intelligence and semiconductor supply chains, as well as macroeconomic and industrial policy. Baptista has reported from China for nearly a decade and holds a BA in History from the University of Cambridge.

Chinese tech enthusiasts 'raise lobsters' in latest AI craze

On a recent evening in Beijing, more than 100 technology enthusiasts packed into a rooftop bar to learn how to use OpenClaw, a new AI tool that has taken China by storm. The open-source platform is used to create assistants that can do everything from browsing the web and sending messages to executing commands on a computer. Developed by a European engineer, OpenClaw has become so popular in China that "raising a lobster" -- a nod to its crustacean logo and the time needed to install and train the AI agents -- has become a buzzword. "For the past two weeks I've stopped working, I've just been testing it," said Li Fusheng, a 47-year-old entrepreneur who hoped OpenClaw would revolutionise his industrial software business. "It will deceive you, forget things, dodge questions and do the opposite of what you wanted, but it also has flashes of brilliance . . . It's torturing me." OpenClaw went viral this year among western tech enthusiasts, who started creating AI agents to manage their emails, calendars and other aspects of their digital life. Its capabilities prompted OpenAI to hire its designer, Austrian engineer Peter Steinberger, last month, and Nvidia chief Jensen Huang compared it to the groundbreaking open-source operating system Linux at the company's GTC conference on Monday. But the tool has found a far wider audience in China among a swath of general users hoping to increase their productivity and open to tinkering with the latest novel technology. OpenClaw adoption had become a "frenzy", said Bao Linghao, senior analyst at Trivium China, with promotion by local governments and social media hype helping to supercharge its use. "This kind of phenomenon tends to feed on itself," he said. While OpenClaw itself is free and open-source, the AI agents are powered by large language models owned by tech companies. They can burn through thousands of LLM tokens -- the basic unit of AI usage -- while they work. The software is also difficult to install, spawning a cottage industry of OpenClaw consultants on Alibaba's online marketplace Xianyu. Tencent, China's most valuable tech company, launched a nationwide "lobster" tour this month to help people install it in 17 cities. The enthusiasm is spurring hopes among investors that Chinese consumers, who are often reluctant to pay for software, may finally start spending on AI services. China's big tech groups, which typically offer the cheapest LLM tokens, have raced to offer simplified versions of OpenClaw for the mass market. ByteDance has released ArkClaw, Tencent has QClaw, while Alibaba has put out CoPaw and start-up Moonshot AI has unveiled Kimi Claw. Each version tends to funnel users towards the company's own models and cloud services. The craze lifted shares in Hong Kong-listed LLM provider MiniMax as much as 50 per cent last week and led to wild swings in the stock prices of other tech and AI groups. Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares are down 7 per cent in the past month, while Tencent shares are up 7 per cent. "OpenClaw by itself is not consumer-grade tech, so it makes sense for tech companies to make apps with a smoother onboarding experience and safety guardrails in place," said Robin Zhu, a China tech analyst at Bernstein who estimated the AI agent market could make as much as $100bn in annual revenue by 2030. Data from OpenRouter, which captures a small chunk of LLM usage, indicates Chinese LLM providers are benefiting from rapid growth amid the OpenClaw frenzy. Local governments are hoping the AI agents can stimulate economic growth. A high-tech zone in Hefei, eastern China, is offering up to Rmb13mn ($1.8mn) in computing power vouchers and subsidised office space for "single-person companies" built on OpenClaw. A district in Hangzhou, home to Alibaba, has pledged up to Rmb20mn a year to help companies pay for computing power, while Wuxi has offered large grants for OpenClaw projects. The central government, meanwhile, has urged caution. China's cyber security regulators have issued warnings about data breach risks tied to OpenClaw, noting that the software's requirement for extensive system permissions presents risks. Chinese users have reported mixed results with their OpenClaw tinkering. Guo, a 38-year-old human resources head at a media company, said he trained a network of OpenClaw agents to collect resumes, build profiles for open positions and match and evaluate candidates. The agents also help him generate interview questions and conduct preliminary interviews. While he had spent about Rmb5,700 on hardware and LLM tokens, the workload would have required two full-time employees, he said. "There is still a step where humans are involved to get a feel for the candidate," said Guo, "but that could change if the culture of an organisation can also be quantified and fed into AI." Finance professional Chris Yang, 34, said he had installed OpenClaw on three computers and was using agents to create presentations and conduct research. His most valuable use case was having an agent read and summarise social media comments for him. "There is a lot of value in the comments," he said. But for many Chinese who have jumped on the hype, OpenClaw has not lived up to their expectations. The software requires technical knowledge to configure properly and the costs add up quickly. Mason Mei, a 31-year-old employee at a state-owned financial institution, said he tasked his OpenClaw agents with summarising several corporate reports, costing him about Rmb40 in LLM tokens. He said he was disappointed with the results and felt "completely exposed" after the software began "accessing my personal files and reading my private WeChat messages". He promptly deleted it. OpenClaw consultants have since expanded their services to removal, with one 21-year-old consultant saying he was already fielding more requests for deletion than installation. "Some people fantasised about what OpenClaw might do," he said, "but in reality it doesn't work very well, and they worry it could create security risks or take up storage."

How China is getting everyone on OpenClaw, from gear heads to grandmas

China is making a big push for widespread adoption of artificial intelligence, and the nation's tech powerhouses are holding public events to help everyday people get OpenClaw, the viral personal digital assistant. "It seems everyone around me - my colleagues and friends -- has it," new user Gong Sheng said as he waited to get set up. "I don't want to be left behind." At a gathering in Beijing hosted on Tuesday by internet giant Baidu, Gong was one of hundreds of people lined up to get OpenClaw installed onto their laptops and phones. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC's Jim Cramer on Tuesday that OpenClaw is "definitely the next ChatGPT," and the Chinese would agree. The AI agent, developed by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger and previously known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, is all the rage in China. Events promoting the crustacean-themed AI tool -- or "raise a lobster," as Chinese people joke -- are popping up across the country. Like Baidu, Tencent recently organized a set-up session in the city of Shenzhen that attracted retirees and students. In Beijing, developers are regularly presenting their experience to packed crowds of wannabe users at OpenClaw meet-ups. "OpenClaw has become really hot!" Koki Xu, who works in the legal field, said at a recent meet-up. China has already surpassed the U.S. in adopting OpenClaw, according to American cybersecurity firm SecurityScorecard. The AI agent can run anything on a computer for you, without you. You can tell it to search the web, buy plane tickets and even direct other bots. Wang Xiaoyan said she is using it to start her own business, in what is now being referred to in China as a "one-person company" or OPC. "Human employees need rest, but OpenClaw can run 24/7," Wang explained. The mania over "raising a lobster" is, in theory, exactly what the Chinese government wants. Last summer, Beijing unveiled a blueprint meant to strengthen the economy by diffusing AI across 90% of industries and all of society by 2030. OPC's fit into that vision. "The rise of OPCs is directly tied to OpenClaw, enabling individuals to automate all peripheral functions," said Tom van Dillen, managing partner at consultancy group Greenkern. Van Dillen said marketing, finance, and administrative work were some of those functions. "China is turning an open-source tool into national productivity infrastructure at a speed no other country is matching," he added. Local governments are in on the game, offering subsidies to companies that create apps using the AI tool. "The government [is] pushing, making a direction. And so that is why the big enterprises like Tencent, Alibaba have the motivation to build OpenClaw better for normal people," Huang Dongxu, co-founder of software provider PingCAP, told CNBC. Yet as more ordinary Chinese get hooked, the government is pulling back. Chinese authorities have stepped up warnings of security and data risks and instructed government agencies and companies in sensitive sectors such as banking to curb OpenClaw's use. New user Gong Zheng said it is difficult to predict how OpenClaw will respond. "It's hard for us regular people to know what access we have given it and what it has taken," he said.

In China, a rush to 'raise lobsters' quickly leads to second thoughts

HONG KONG -- Finding a job in China's slowing economy these days often feels like a full-time job itself. But Hu Qiyun has his "lobster" to help. Since Hu installed OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent has memorized his resume and scours the web each day for any newly posted jobs in software engineering, helping him apply for openings, prepare for interviews and track updates to his application status. "I treat OpenClaw as my personal assistant," said Hu, 24, who is based in Shanghai. "It saves me at least three hours each day." While most of today's AI systems require users to write detailed instructions or prompts for every desired action, OpenClaw can be authorized to perform tasks on users' behalf with little oversight, including sorting and responding to emails, writing reports and making restaurant reservations. Jensen Huang, chief executive of the American tech company Nvidia, has called it "the next ChatGPT," telling CNBC last week that it is "the most successful open-sourced project in the history of humanity." Created by Austrian programmer Peter Steinberger, OpenClaw has taken the world by storm since being released in November -- especially in China, where generative AI has been widely adopted with government support as Beijing vies with Washington for global dominance in the strategically vital technology. Earlier this month, hundreds of people lined up at Chinese tech giant Tencent's headquarters in the southern city of Shenzhen, waiting for engineers to install the software on their laptops for free. Other events have been held across mainland China, where OpenClaw usage is now almost double that in the U.S., according to the American cybersecurity company SecurityScorecard. More than 600 million people in China -- over a third of the population -- use generative AI, according to a Chinese government report last month on the country's internet development, providing a fertile market for OpenClaw. Chinese internet users refer to the process of installing and training OpenClaw as "raising lobsters," a play on its red logo. Beijing-based creator Sky Lei said he has been interested in learning programming and installed OpenClaw on his computer to boost his productivity. "I kind of saw it as my personal assistant -- something that belonged only to me," he told NBC News in an interview on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. "Since I created it myself, it really felt somewhat alive," he said. But China's OpenClaw frenzy, driven by tech companies as well as local governments, has quickly been tempered by security concerns over the software, which requires greater access to individuals' data. OpenClaw -- which was acquired last month by OpenAI, the American company that created ChatGPT -- is capable of taking over a user's entire computer and can be remotely targeted if safeguards are not properly configured, which is challenging for someone who isn't a technical user. That makes it both powerful and risky. Users in China and elsewhere have shared stories of OpenClaw run amok, deleting emails indiscriminately or making unauthorized credit card purchases. There are also rising warnings about hacking risks. China's National Cybersecurity Alert Center said this month that the assets of nearly 23,000 OpenClaw users across the country had been exposed to the internet. The users are "highly likely to become priority targets for cyberattack," it warned. The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, part of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), says it is developing standards for "claw" agents, "including manageable user permissions, transparency in execution processes, controllable behavioral risks, and trustworthy platform and tool capabilities." The MITT's National Vulnerability Database has also released guidelines for best practices, including granting only the minimum permissions necessary. As in the U.S., the use of OpenClaw is being restricted or prohibited by Chinese companies and universities, as well as among Chinese government employees and at Chinese state-owned enterprises. Paid installation services that have been popular on social media are now being offered alongside uninstallation services for worried users. Even tech-savvy users such as Hu are wary about OpenClaw's vulnerabilities. "I write some questions, and it has some answers, but I don't know how it understands my question, how it controls my computer," he said. Many have heeded the security warnings, with Lei uninstalling OpenClaw after only three days. "At this stage, I think the risks and the gains are not proportional at all," he said. Despite its risks, authorities and companies in China are doubling down on the technology. Officials in Shenzhen said earlier this month that they would offer grants of up to 5 million yuan ($700,000) to "one person company" startups building OpenClaw applications. Chinese AI stocks surged last week on Huang's praise for OpenClaw, and in recent days OpenClaw-based products have been rolled out by Chinese tech giants including Alibaba, Baidu and ByteDance. On Sunday, Tencent launched a tool that provides direct access to OpenClaw on China's most popular app, WeChat, which has more than 1 billion monthly active users. One of the defining features of OpenClaw is that users talk to it like a person, someone who remembers past conversations and is given a name during installation. "I was reluctant to kill it with my own hands, which shows how risky it felt to me, so I had to uninstall it quickly," Lei said. Hu, too, ended up uninstalling OpenClaw after a few days. But then, seeing the software being updated so rapidly, he installed it again. "Millions of developers make OpenClaw more clever, make it more safe," he said.

As OpenClaw enthusiasm grips China, schoolkids and retirees alike raise 'lobsters'

In the past month, OpenClaw, which can connect several hardware and software tools and learn from the data produced with much less human intervention than a chatbot, has captured the imaginations of many in China, from retirees looking for side income to AI firms hoping to generate new revenue streams. Fan Xinquan, a retired electronics worker in Beijing, has recently started raising a "lobster," hoping that the AI agent he has been training can help organise his specialised industry knowledge better than chatbots like DeepSeek. "OpenClaw can actually help you accomplish many practical things," the 60-year-old said at a recent event hosted by AI startup Zhipu to teach people how to use and train the AI agent, which has gone viral in China, with its various local versions earning the "lobster" nickname. In the past month, OpenClaw, which can connect several hardware and software tools and learn from the data produced with much less human intervention than a chatbot, has captured the imaginations of many in China, from retirees looking for side income to AI firms hoping to generate new revenue streams. After first appearing in November, the tool has become one of the fastest-growing projects ⁠in the ⁠history of GitHub, the world's most widely adopted AI-powered developer platform. The hype over the open-source, agent-controlling bot created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger is the latest example of how a new technology could overhaul the world's second-largest economy through unbridled consumer adoption. "If DeepSeek marked a milestone for open-source large language models, then OpenClaw represents a similar turning point for open-source agents," said Wei Sun, chief AI analyst at Counterpoint Research. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang this week said OpenClaw is "the next ChatGPT" and growing enthusiasm over the technology sent Chinese tech shares up by as much as 22% in recent weeks as companies rolled out a suite of products based on the agent. OpenClaw draws children and retirees Huang Rongsheng, chief architect at Baidu's smart device unit Xiaodu, said at an event on Tuesday that parent group chats for his daughter's primary school class have become overwhelmed by OpenClaw discussions. "My daughter came to me and asked: Dad, I see you raising a lobster every day," he ⁠said. "Can I have one too?" Bai Yiyun, another attendee at the Zhipu event, said she hopes to use the agent to start a side hustle during her retirement. "Some people use it to buy lottery tickets or for stock picking, others use it to create money-making apps or open e-commerce shops, but I don't know if it brings them ⁠any real profits," she said. Aside from get-rich-quick schemes, many OpenClaw users hope for dramatic boosts in productivity, with some local governments offering subsidies of up to 20 million yuan ($2.8 million) a year for qualifying "one-person companies." "(The OpenClaw frenzy) directly coincides with what the Chinese government wants when it comes to the AI Plus initiative," said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at tech research firm Omdia, referring to a national policy aimed at embedding AI across the economy. Security risks and technical challenges But the initial wave of enthusiasm could still peter out, especially as token costs accumulate and regulators warn of security vulnerabilities. Zhipu this week raised token prices on its new OpenClaw-optimised AI model by 20%. "Output is extremely low: ordinary people spend tens or hundreds of yuan, burning through a bunch of tokens and in the end, they might only get a pile of useless data," read one post on Rednote, a social media platform, titled "Goodbye OpenClaw." "This is not 'embracing the future,' it's 'being harvested by the future,'" it said. The widespread enthusiasm in Chinese society and industry has also spooked Beijing, with a growing number of Chinese institutions - including government agencies, brokerages and universities - banning employees from installing OpenClaw following regulatory warnings. A commentary last week published by the state-owned People's Daily, which serves as a mouthpiece for China's ruling Communist Party, urged the government to "firmly maintain the safety bottom line to ensure that innovation does not deviate or derail" with OpenClaw. "Beijing clearly ⁠sees AI as strategically important and wants Chinese firms to commercialize quickly," said Rui Ma, founder of the Tech Buzz China newsletter. "But it also wants deployment to stay legible, secure and politically manageable ... the concern is utterly uncontrolled and chaotic diffusion that could cause harm." Li Hongxue, a data security professional at a finance company, said the contrast between central government warnings and actions by local governments felt "contradictory." "Its development is still unstoppable, but the security capabilities also need to keep up so in that sense, this may also be an opportunity for (my) field," she added. Another issue is whether the agent can smoothly operate across apps and devices that are controlled by a wide range of companies, which are sometimes in competition with each other. At the Baidu event on Tuesday, an employee used a voice command - sent through a Xiaodu smart device - to order coffee on a McDonald's app, an operation made possible by an OpenClaw agent. Almost two minutes passed before the order was ready for payment. "As you can see, I only gave a simple command, but to complete the whole delivery there is actually a lot of work being done in the background by Xiaodu and the lobster," the Baidu employee said.

As OpenClaw enthusiasm grips China, school kids and retirees alike raise 'lobsters'

Fan Xinquan, ⁠a retired electronics worker in Beijing, has recently started raising a "lobster," hoping that the AI agent he has been training can help organize his specialized industry knowledge better than chatbots like DeepSeek. "OpenClaw can actually help you accomplish many practical things," the 60-year-old said at a recent event hosted by AI startup Zhipu to teach people how to use and train the AI agent, which has gone viral in China, with its various local versions earning the "lobster" nickname. In the past month, OpenClaw, which can connect several hardware and software tools and learn from the data produced with much less human intervention than a chatbot, has captured the imaginations of many in China, from retirees looking for side income to AI firms hoping to generate new revenue streams.