‘Raise a lobster’: How OpenClaw is the latest craze transforming China’s AI sector

On a Friday afternoon in March, nearly 1,000 people lined up outside Tencent’s headquarters in Shenzhen to get a piece of software installed on their laptops. Engineers from the company’s cloud unit helped students, retirees, and office workers deploy OpenClaw , an open-source AI agent built by Austrian programmer Peter Steinberger. Recommended Video 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. China’s users are now trying a “ raise a lobster ”, a phrase referring OpenClaw’s red lobster logo. It’s proved to be a shot in the arm for China’s 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—units of data processed by AI—among the top nine models on AI marketplace OpenRouter, according to HSBC. The OpenClaw craze also aligns with China’s embrace of open-source AI, a strategy that has helped build labs’ reputation among the developer community and slowly helped models work their way into global business. What is OpenClaw? Steinberger released OpenClaw on GitHub last November, where it quickly caught on among AI developers and hobbyists. OpenClaw is what is called “an agentic harness.” It isn’t an AI model itself—a user has to pick a model from an AI company to serve as the agent’s 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’t forget what it has done so far. An OpenClaw agent runs locally on a user’s 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 . Over the past several weeks, China’s biggest cloud providers—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 big tech companies also released their own “Claw” frameworks : Tencent’s WorkBuddy, Minimax’s MaxClaw, MoonShot’s Kimi Claw, among others. Local governments joined in. Shenzhen’s Longgang district offered grants of up to 10 million yuan ($1.4 million) for “one-person companies,” 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. Those subsidies are landing in a market where users are eager to experiment with new AI. “Younger generations in Asia, and especially in China, are part of a high-tech adoption culture,” Jan Wuppermann, the head of service assurance, data and AI for NTT Data, said to Fortune . “There’s a mindset I often hear from everyday Chinese friends: It’s there anyway, I may as well use it.” In the West, OpenClaw’s popularity has been t empered by security concerns . AI agents can be vulnerable to “prompt injection” 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. OpenClaw is building upon a strong 2026 for China’s AI sector. Nearly every major Chinese AI lab has released updates to their open-source models, including Moonshot’s Kimi 2.5, Minimax’s M2.5 and Zhipu’s GLM-5. ByteDance’s new AI video-generation model, Seedance 2.0, also went viral after debuting at the 2026 Spring Festival Gala, one of China’s most widely-watched TV events. 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’s ubiquitous WeChat superapp, The Information reported on March 10, citing unnamed sources. Tencent’s AI efforts have currently proved less successful than its rivals Alibaba and ByteDance; Tencent’s chatbot, Yuanbao has just 109 million users, much smaller than ByteDance’s Doubao and its 315 million users, according to The Information. The OpenClaw craze has helped the stock market fortunes of some Chinese AI companies. Tencent’s 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. Still, China’s AI startups have a long road to profitability. MiniMax released its 2025 earnings on March 2, giving investors the first look at what the financials of an AI lab