Sometimes a technological wave comes not from the labs of a corporate giant, but from the code of one man who published a project on GitHub. OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent developed by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, previously known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, has turned into one of the biggest technological phenomena in China since the emergence of DeepSeek in March 2026.
Baidu and Tencent are organizing gatherings and meetups to help everyday users set up OpenClaw. China has already overtaken the US in adoption of this tool, according to US cybersecurity firm SecurityScorecard. Images of lines stretching outside Baidu’s headquarters in Beijing, where several hundred people waited for engineers to install software on their laptops on March 11, have gone viral. Tencent held a similar free event in Shenzhen where it helped “hundreds” of users install the tool, while JD.com launched a special page where users can pay 399 yuan (about $58) for “remote” help installing the software.
The vocabulary that arose around this tool speaks for itself about the intensity of the culture that was formed. The Chinese user community has dubbed AI agents “lobsters” and describes the process of training and improving a personal agent as “raising lobsters”, alluding to how agents become smarter through feedback. At developer meetings in Beijing, the halls are packed, and the engineers have found a new business niche: they charge 500 yuan (about $72) to come to an address and install the software, and the same amount to uninstall if the user changes his mind.
The big Chinese players quickly recognized what was happening. Baidu introduced a whole family of “lobsters” that includes the DuMate desktop assistant, the RedClaw mobile platform and the DuClaw cloud service that allows users to run agents without configuring hardware. The company’s smart speakers will integrate OpenClaw functionality, enabling voice commands to trigger complex actions on home devices. Tencent has built a full suite of OpenClaw-based AI products compatible with the WeChat superapp. The company became a sponsor of the project along with OpenAI and Baidu on March 16, after Steinberger accused it of copying the GitHub open-source project without providing support.
Local Chinese authorities are actively involved in the expansion. The government subsidizes companies that create applications using the tool, and Tom van Dielen of the consulting group Greenkern estimates that China is turning the open-source tool into a national productivity infrastructure at a rate that no other country can compete with.
There is a gray side to this enthusiasm. Chinese authorities have stepped up warnings about security and data leakage risks and have instructed government agencies and companies in sensitive sectors like banking to limit the use of OpenClaw, noting that AI agents, unlike chatbots, require broad access to users’ data and systems to function. The potential for abuse of those powers is not trivial. Jensen Huang called OpenClaw “definitely the next ChatGPT,” but the question of who controls the lobster that controls your digital life remains without a simple answer, reports CNBC.