{"id":339833,"date":"2026-03-15T02:22:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-15T02:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/339833\/"},"modified":"2026-03-15T02:22:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-15T02:22:07","slug":"raise-a-lobster-how-openclaw-is-the-latest-craze-transforming-chinas-ai-sector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/339833\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Raise a lobster\u2019: How OpenClaw is the latest craze transforming China\u2019s AI sector"},"content":{"rendered":"

On a Friday afternoon in March, nearly 1,000 people lined up<\/a> outside Tencent\u2019s headquarters in Shenzhen to get a piece of software installed on their laptops. Engineers from the company\u2019s cloud unit helped students, retirees, and office workers deploy OpenClaw<\/a>, an open-source AI agent built by Austrian programmer Peter Steinberger.<\/p>\n

Over the past month, major Chinese cloud providers debuted their own version of OpenClaw, local governments dangled grants to startups that build OpenClaw apps, and a cottage industry sprung up helping users install the open-source framework.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s users are now trying a \u201craise a lobster<\/a>\u201d, a phrase referring OpenClaw\u2019s red lobster logo. It\u2019s proved to be a shot in the arm for China\u2019s AI startups, which could now see a surge of usage. In early February, Chinese AI models for the first time surpassed U.S. models in share of tokens\u2014units of data processed by AI\u2014among the top nine models on AI marketplace OpenRouter, according to HSBC.<\/p>\n

The OpenClaw craze also aligns with China\u2019s embrace of open-source AI, a strategy that has helped build labs\u2019 reputation among the developer community and slowly helped models work their way into global business.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What is OpenClaw?<\/p>\n

Steinberger released OpenClaw on GitHub last November, where it quickly caught on among AI developers and hobbyists. OpenClaw is what is called \u201can agentic harness.\u201d It isn\u2019t an AI model itself\u2014a user has to pick a model from an AI company to serve as the agent\u2019s brain. But OpenClaw consists of a set of instructions for how an AI agent should deconstruct a goal into a series of subtasks, protocols that allow a user to connect various software tools for the AI agent to use, and also a memory function that means the AI agent won\u2019t forget what it has done so far.\u00a0<\/p>\n

An OpenClaw agent runs locally on a user\u2019s machine and connects to tools like messaging apps, email, calendars and other systems, making it easy for users to ask an AI agent to do useful things for them, like regularly check their email and automatically reply to certain messages, or make reservations on their behalf. Steinberger, who has a long history as an entrepreneur, has since been hired by OpenAI<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Over the past several weeks, China\u2019s biggest cloud providers\u2014Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, ByteDance\u2019s Volcano Engine, JD.com<\/a>, and Baidu\u2014have all embraced OpenClaw, or some spinoff of it. A flood of startups and big tech companies also released their own \u201cClaw\u201d frameworks<\/a>: Tencent\u2019s WorkBuddy, Minimax\u2019s MaxClaw, MoonShot\u2019s Kimi Claw, among others.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Local governments joined in. Shenzhen\u2019s Longgang district offered grants<\/a> of up to 10 million yuan ($1.4 million) for \u201cone-person companies,\u201d or firms where the founder acts as sole shareholder. Wuxi, a city close to Shanghai, dangled up to 5 million yuan ($730,000) for OpenClaw-powered breakthroughs in robotics and industrial applications.<\/p>\n

Those subsidies are landing in a market where users are eager to experiment with new AI. \u201cYounger generations in Asia, and especially in China, are part of a high-tech adoption culture,\u201d Jan Wuppermann, the head of service assurance, data and AI for NTT Data, said to Fortune. \u201cThere\u2019s a mindset I often hear from everyday Chinese friends: It\u2019s there anyway, I may as well use it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the West, OpenClaw\u2019s popularity has been tempered by security concerns<\/a>. AI agents can be vulnerable to \u201cprompt injection\u201d attacks, where a bad actor can plant malicious instructions on a website. OpenClaw agents have been tricked into uploading sensitive data, including financial information and crypto wallet keys; in other cases, agents have deleted emails and code libraries.\u00a0<\/p>\n

OpenClaw is building upon a strong 2026 for China\u2019s AI sector. Nearly every major Chinese AI lab has released updates to their open-source models, including Moonshot\u2019s Kimi 2.5, Minimax\u2019s M2.5 and Zhipu\u2019s GLM-5. ByteDance\u2019s new AI video-generation model, Seedance 2.0, also went viral<\/a> after debuting at the 2026 Spring Festival Gala, one of China\u2019s most widely-watched TV events.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The shift to agentic AI is giving some Big Tech companies the opportunity to catch up with the nimble AI labs. Tencent is now working on a new AI agent that can be integrated with the company\u2019s ubiquitous WeChat superapp, The Information<\/a> reported on March 10, citing unnamed sources. Tencent\u2019s AI efforts have currently proved less successful than its rivals Alibaba and ByteDance; Tencent\u2019s chatbot, Yuanbao has just 109 million users, much smaller than ByteDance\u2019s Doubao and its 315 million users, according to The Information.<\/a><\/p>\n

The OpenClaw craze has helped the stock market fortunes of some Chinese AI companies. Tencent\u2019s stock is up by 8.9% over the past week. MiniMax is up by 27.4% since the weekend; shares are now up by more than 600% from its IPO earlier this year.<\/p>\n

Still, China\u2019s AI startups have a long road to profitability. MiniMax released its 2025 earnings<\/a> on March 2, giving investors the first look at what the financials of an AI lab look like.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The answer? Expensive.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The AI startup reported total revenue of $79 million, an increase of 159%. Over 70% of this revenue came from overseas markets, showing that MiniMax is finding traction outside of China. Yet the company still posted a net loss of $1.8 billion, in part thanks to research and development costs totaling $252 million.<\/p>\n

Still, investors don\u2019t seem to care. At one point last week, MiniMax was worth more than tech giant Baidu, despite the latter generating $18.5 billion in 2025 revenue, more than 230 times more than MiniMax.\u00a0<\/p>\n

China\u2019s open-source goes global<\/p>\n

Chinese open-source models have quietly\u2014and not so quietly\u2014started to spread among global business. Airbnb<\/a> CEO Brian Chesky raised eyebrows last year when he admitted<\/a> that the company used Alibaba\u2019s open-source Qwen model to power its customer service agent. \u201cIt\u2019s very good. It\u2019s also fast and cheap,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Last November, AI Singapore, the city-state\u2019s national AI programme, adopted Qwen<\/a> to build Qwen-SEA-LION-v4, a large language model optimized for Southeast Asian languages. Alibaba now claims the Qwen family of models has been downloaded over one billion times, and used by over 200,000 developers.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can see the attraction of open-weights models,\u201d says Jeff Walters, who leads the Asia-Pacific tech practice for the Boston Consulting Group<\/a>. \u201cThere may be a slight lag to how the latest frontier models might perform but, in a lot of situations, you don\u2019t always need the best. \u2018Good enough and cheap\u2019 is sometimes the right tool to pull out of the toolbox\u201d.<\/p>\n

Using open-source also gives companies options, and doesn\u2019t lock them into one particular provider\u2014which may be useful for startups trying to navigate a constantly-changing world of regulations, export controls, and shifting alliances.<\/p>\n

Still, open-source models shift the burden of running compute onto the user. \u201cYou can get narrowly excited about cost-per-token comparisons between a commercial model and an open-source model, but that\u2019s only one part of the cost,\u201d Walters cautions.\u200b\u00a0<\/p>\n

Companies need to pay for their own processors, but there are hidden costs too. Wuppermann notes that \u201chidden costs, like security breaches and complexity, often aren\u2019t measured, and instead show up in other dimensions, like extra headcount or longer time-to-market\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For Wuppermann, the decision to go open-source is mostly philosophical. \u201cThose who have converted to open-source will always advocate open-source.\u201d<\/p>\n

China\u2019s AI challenges<\/p>\n

Even as OpenClaw and Chinese open-source models gain momentum, China\u2019s AI ecosystem faces rising scrutiny over data security, intellectual property and Beijing\u2019s own shifting priorities.<\/p>\n

In February, Anthropic accused three Chinese firms<\/a>\u2014DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax\u2014of trying to extract knowledge from its Claude model. OpenAI has also accused Chinese labs of conducting distillation attacks, or using U.S. models to help train Chinese ones.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Oddly enough, the complaints may have ended up reinforcing the reputation of Chinese labs. Reaction to Anthropic\u2019s accusations on social media were mixed, with some users noting that even if DeepSeek and others were engaging in \u201cillicit\u201d distillation, they were at least sharing their work\u2014unlike Anthropic, which has kept its AI models closed-source.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s own commitment to open source might also be fraying at the edges. On March 3, Lin Junyang\u2014the technical lead of Alibaba\u2019s Qwen model and a driving force behind the company\u2019s open-source strategy\u2014suddenly announced his resignation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Lin\u2019s exit exposed tensions between Alibaba\u2019s open-source ambitions and its push to commercialize flagship models. Local media reported<\/a> the Qwen team disagreed with the goals of Alibaba leadership, and expressed frustration<\/a> that cloud customers sometimes got access to compute before they did. (Alibaba has affirmed<\/a> that it isn\u2019t abandoning its open-source strategy)<\/p>\n

Beijing might also try to dampen enthusiasm over OpenClaw. On Wednesday, Bloomberg<\/a> reported that both government agencies and state-owned enterprises were warned against installing OpenClaw on work devices, citing security risks.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still, Chinese companies keep on releasing their own versions of OpenClaw. On March 12, Sensetime, once one of China\u2019s most prominent AI firms, announced that it had integrated its office assistant \u201cOffice Raccoon\u201d with OpenClaw.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And local Chinese are finding ways to capitalize on the craze. Engineers have found a new business: Charging 500 yuan ($72) to install OpenClaw on-site. And if someone ends up getting cold feet over giving an AI agent access to their entire lives? They\u2019ll charge you to uninstall it too.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On a Friday afternoon in March, nearly 1,000 people lined up outside Tencent\u2019s headquarters in Shenzhen to get…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":339834,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,1657,85,46,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-339833","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-china","12":"tag-il","13":"tag-israel","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/339834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}