Author: Laurie Chen and Eduardo Baptista
BEIJING, March 19 (Reuters) – Fan Xinquan, a retired electronics worker in Beijing, recently started raising a “lobster”, hoping that the artificial intelligence agent he trained could help him organize professional industry knowledge better than chatbots such as DeepSeek.
“OpenClaw can actually help you do a lot of real things,” the 60-year-old said at a recent event hosted by AI startup Zhipu to teach people how to use and train AI agents. The AI agent quickly became popular in China, with its various local versions earning the nickname “Lobster.”
Over the past month, OpenClaw, which can connect to a variety of hardware and software tools and learn from the data generated with far less human intervention than a chatbot, has captured the imagination of many in China, from retirees looking for side income to AI companies looking to generate new revenue streams.
Since 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 developer platform.
The hype surrounding an open-source agent-controlled robot created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger is the latest example of how new technology can revolutionize the world’s second-largest economy through unrestricted consumer adoption.
“If DeepSeek marks a milestone for open source large language models, OpenClaw represents a similar turning point for open source agents,” said Wei Sun, principal artificial intelligence analyst at Counterpoint Research.
Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said this week that OpenClaw is the “next ChatGPT,” and Chinese tech stocks have risen 22% in recent weeks as enthusiasm for the technology grows as companies roll out a suite of products based on the agent.
Open claw attracts children and retirees
Huang Rongsheng, chief architect of Baidu’s smart device unit Xiaodu, said at an event on Tuesday that a parent group chat in his daughter’s elementary school class had been inundated with discussions about OpenClaw.
“My daughter came to me and asked: Dad, I see you keep a lobster every day,” he said. “Can I have one too?”
Bai Yiyun, another participant in the Zhipu event, said she hopes to use an agent to start a side business during her retirement.
“Some people use it to buy lottery tickets or pick stocks, others use it to create money-making apps or open e-commerce stores, but I don’t know if it brings them any real profit,” she said.
In addition to get-rich-quick schemes, many OpenClaw users are hoping for a big boost in productivity, with some local governments offering annual subsidies of up to 20 million yuan ($2.8 million) to qualifying “one-person companies.”
“(The frenzy over OpenClaw) aligns directly with the Chinese government’s aspirations in terms of the AI Plus initiative,” said Lian Jye Su, principal analyst at technology research firm Omdia, referring to a national policy aimed at embedding artificial intelligence into the economy.
Security risks and technical challenges
But the initial enthusiasm may still fade, especially as token costs pile up and regulators warn of security vulnerabilities. This week, Zhipu increased the token price of its new OpenClaw-optimized artificial intelligence model by 20%.
A post on the social media platform Rednote titled “Goodbye OpenClaw” reads: “The output is extremely low: ordinary people spend tens or hundreds of dollars and burn a bunch of tokens, and what they end up with may just be a bunch of useless data.”
“This is not ’embracing the future’ but ‘harvesting by the future’,” it said.
The widespread enthusiasm among Chinese society and industry has also alarmed Beijing, with a growing number of Chinese institutions – including government agencies, brokerages and universities – banning employees from installing OpenClaw after receiving regulatory warnings.
The state-owned People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of China’s ruling Communist Party, published a commentary last week urging the government to work with OpenClaw to “resolutely maintain the bottom line of safety and ensure that innovation does not deviate or derail.”
“Beijing clearly sees artificial intelligence as strategically important and wants Chinese companies to commercialize it quickly,” said Ma Rui, founder of the Tech Buzz China newsletter.
“But it also wants deployments to remain clear, safe and politically controllable… The concern is a completely uncontrolled and chaotic spread that could cause harm.”
Li Hongxue, a data security expert at a financial company, said the contrast between the central government’s warnings and local government actions felt “contradictory.”
“It’s still growing unstoppably, but security capabilities need to keep up, so in that sense, this could be an opportunity in (my) field as well,” she added.
Another question is whether the agent can work smoothly across applications and devices controlled by numerous companies, which sometimes compete with each other.
At a Baidu event on Tuesday, an employee used voice commands (sent via a Xiaodu smart device) to order coffee on the McDonald’s app, an action enabled by an OpenClaw agent.
After about two minutes, the order was ready for payment.
“As you can see, I only gave a simple order, but to complete the entire delivery, Xiaodu and Lobster actually did a lot of work in the background,” the Baidu employee said.
(Reporting by Laurie Chen and Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Miyoung Kim and Thomas Derpinghaus)
