On a Friday afternoon in March, almost 1,000 folks lined up outdoors Tencent’s headquarters in Shenzhen to get a bit of software program put in on their laptops. Engineers from the corporate’s cloud unit helped college students, retirees, and workplace staff deploy OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent constructed by Austrian programmer Peter Steinberger.
Over the previous month, main Chinese language cloud suppliers debuted their very own model of OpenClaw, native governments dangled grants to startups that construct OpenClaw apps, and a cottage trade sprung up serving to customers set up the open-source framework.
China’s customers at the moment are attempting a “raise a lobster”, a phrase referring OpenClaw’s crimson lobster emblem. It’s proved to be a shot within the arm for China’s AI startups, which might now see a surge of utilization. In early February, Chinese language AI fashions for the primary time surpassed U.S. fashions in share of tokens—items of knowledge processed by AI—among the many prime 9 fashions on AI market OpenRouter, in accordance with HSBC.
The OpenClaw craze additionally aligns with China’s embrace of open-source AI, a method that has helped construct labs’ repute among the many developer neighborhood and slowly helped fashions work their means into international enterprise.
What’s OpenClaw?
Steinberger launched OpenClaw on GitHub final November, the place it shortly caught on amongst AI builders and hobbyists. OpenClaw is what is named “an agentic harness.” It isn’t an AI mannequin itself—a consumer has to choose a mannequin from an AI firm to function the agent’s mind. However OpenClaw consists of a set of directions for a way an AI agent ought to deconstruct a purpose right into a sequence of subtasks, protocols that permit a consumer to attach varied software program instruments for the AI agent to make use of, and likewise a reminiscence operate which means the AI agent received’t neglect what it has achieved to date.
Over the previous a number of weeks, China’s greatest cloud suppliers—Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, ByteDance’s Volcano Engine, JD.com, and Baidu—have all embraced OpenClaw, or some spinoff of it. A flood of startups and large tech firms additionally launched their very own “Claw” frameworks: Tencent’s WorkBuddy, Minimax’s MaxClaw, MoonShot’s Kimi Claw, amongst others.
Native governments joined in. Shenzhen’s Longgang district provided grants of as much as 10 million yuan ($1.4 million) for “one-person companies,” or companies the place the founder acts as sole shareholder. Wuxi, a metropolis near Shanghai, dangled as much as 5 million yuan ($730,000) for OpenClaw-powered breakthroughs in robotics and industrial purposes.
These subsidies are touchdown in a market the place customers are wanting to experiment with new AI. “Younger generations in Asia, and especially in China, are part of a high-tech adoption culture,” Jan Wuppermann, the top of service assurance, information and AI for NTT Information, mentioned to Fortune. “There’s a mindset I often hear from everyday Chinese friends: It’s there anyway, I may as well use it.”
OpenClaw is constructing upon a powerful 2026 for China’s AI sector. Almost each main Chinese language AI lab has launched updates to their open-source fashions, together with Moonshot’s Kimi 2.5, Minimax’s M2.5 and Zhipu’s GLM-5. ByteDance’s new AI video-generation mannequin, Seedance 2.0, additionally went viral after debuting on the 2026 Spring Pageant Gala, one in every of China’s most widely-watched TV occasions.
The shift to agentic AI is giving some Massive Tech firms the chance to meet up with the nimble AI labs. Tencent is now engaged on a brand new AI agent that may be built-in with the corporate’s ubiquitous WeChat superapp, The Data reported on March 10, citing unnamed sources. Tencent’s AI efforts have at the moment proved much less profitable than its rivals Alibaba and ByteDance; Tencent’s chatbot, Yuanbao has simply 109 million customers, a lot smaller than ByteDance’s Doubao and its 315 million customers, in accordance with The Data.
The OpenClaw craze has helped the inventory market fortunes of some Chinese language AI firms. Tencent’s inventory is up by 8.9% over the previous week. MiniMax is up by 27.4% because the weekend; shares at the moment are up by greater than 600% from its IPO earlier this yr.
Nonetheless, China’s AI startups have a protracted street to profitability. MiniMax launched its 2025 earnings on March 2, giving traders the primary have a look at what the financials of an AI lab appear to be.
The reply? Costly.
The AI startup reported complete income of $79 million, a rise of 159%. Over 70% of this income got here from abroad markets, exhibiting that MiniMax is discovering traction outdoors of China. But the corporate nonetheless posted a internet lack of $1.8 billion, partly because of analysis and growth prices totaling $252 million.
Nonetheless, traders don’t appear to care. At one level final week, MiniMax was price greater than tech big Baidu, regardless of the latter producing $18.5 billion in 2025 income, greater than 230 occasions greater than MiniMax.
China’s open-source goes international
Chinese language open-source fashions have quietly—and never so quietly—began to unfold amongst international enterprise. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky raised eyebrows final yr when he admitted that the corporate used Alibaba’s open-source Qwen mannequin to energy its customer support agent. “It’s very good. It’s also fast and cheap,” he mentioned.
Final November, AI Singapore, the city-state’s nationwide AI programme, adopted Qwen to construct Qwen-SEA-LION-v4, a big language mannequin optimized for Southeast Asian languages. Alibaba now claims the Qwen household of fashions has been downloaded over one billion occasions, and utilized by over 200,000 builders.
“You can see the attraction of open-weights models,” says Jeff Walters, who leads the Asia-Pacific tech follow for the Boston Consulting Group. “There may be a slight lag to how the latest frontier models might perform but, in a lot of situations, you don’t always need the best. ‘Good enough and cheap’ is sometimes the right tool to pull out of the toolbox”.
Utilizing open-source additionally offers firms choices, and doesn’t lock them into one explicit supplier—which can be helpful for startups attempting to navigate a constantly-changing world of laws, export controls, and shifting alliances.
Nonetheless, open-source fashions shift the burden of operating compute onto the consumer. “You can get narrowly excited about cost-per-token comparisons between a commercial model and an open-source model, but that’s only one part of the cost,” Walters cautions.
Firms have to pay for their very own processors, however there are hidden prices too. Wuppermann notes that “hidden costs, like security breaches and complexity, often aren’t measured, and instead show up in other dimensions, like extra headcount or longer time-to-market”.
For Wuppermann, the choice to go open-source is generally philosophical. “Those who have converted to open-source will always advocate open-source.”
China’s AI challenges
Whilst OpenClaw and Chinese language open-source fashions achieve momentum, China’s AI ecosystem faces rising scrutiny over information safety, mental property and Beijing’s personal shifting priorities.
In February, Anthropic accused three Chinese language companies—DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax—of attempting to extract data from its Claude mannequin. OpenAI has additionally accused Chinese language labs of conducting distillation assaults, or utilizing U.S. fashions to assist prepare Chinese language ones.
Oddly sufficient, the complaints might have ended up reinforcing the repute of Chinese language labs. Response to Anthropic’s accusations on social media have been combined, with some customers noting that even when DeepSeek and others have been participating in “illicit” distillation, they have been at the very least sharing their work—not like Anthropic, which has saved its AI fashions closed-source.
China’s personal dedication to open supply may additionally be fraying on the edges. On March 3, Lin Junyang—the technical lead of Alibaba’s Qwen mannequin and a driving drive behind the corporate’s open-source technique—abruptly introduced his resignation.
Lin’s exit uncovered tensions between Alibaba’s open-source ambitions and its push to commercialize flagship fashions. Native media reported the Qwen crew disagreed with the objectives of Alibaba management, and expressed frustration that cloud clients typically acquired entry to compute earlier than they did. (Alibaba has affirmed that it isn’t abandoning its open-source technique)
Beijing may additionally attempt to dampen enthusiasm over OpenClaw. On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that each authorities companies and state-owned enterprises have been warned in opposition to putting in OpenClaw on work gadgets, citing safety dangers.
Nonetheless, Chinese language firms carry on releasing their very own variations of OpenClaw. On March 12, Sensetime, as soon as one in every of China’s most distinguished AI companies, introduced that it had built-in its workplace assistant “Office Raccoon” with OpenClaw.
And native Chinese language are discovering methods to capitalize on the craze. Engineers have discovered a brand new enterprise: Charging 500 yuan ($72) to put in OpenClaw on-site. And if somebody finally ends up getting chilly toes over giving an AI agent entry to their whole lives? They’ll cost you to uninstall it too.
