A queue of hundreds of people snaked around the headquarters of a major technology company in Shenzhen, China, last Friday. They weren’t waiting for the latest iPhone or an autograph from a pop star, but for free assistance from Tencent engineers installing OpenClaw. The surge in demand highlights the growing interest in AI-powered automation tools within the Chinese tech sector.
The AI agent platform, which has sparked privacy debates and scrutiny from U.S. Senators, has become a national phenomenon in China, dubbed “raising a lobster” after OpenClaw’s mascot.
Jarvis for the Masses
OpenClaw (formerly known as Clawdbot) isn’t just another chatbot capable of writing essays on medieval history. It’s an “autonomous agent” – software that actually performs tasks on your computer.
It can book flights, manage emails, write code, and organize calendars. Created by Austrian programmer Peter Steinberger – and subsequently leading to a job offer from OpenAI – the software promises every user a personal “Jarvis,” the digital assistant from the movie Iron Man.
“With it, I feel like I have a virtual assistant doing tasks for me,” Mark Yang, a designer from Shanghai, told the South China Morning Post.
Enthusiasm is so high that a black market has sprung up on social media, with installers offering their services for sums ranging from tens to hundreds of yuan. Some of the more entrepreneurial “masters” have earned as much as 260,000 yuan ($36,000) in just a few days, according to Business Insider.
The One-Person Company: Sending 600 Greetings in 4 Minutes
At the heart of this mania are individuals who see OpenClaw as a tool for survival in China’s hyper-competitive and overburdened economy.
Veteran entrepreneur Fu Shen created an OpenClaw-based agent named Sanwan while recovering from a skiing accident. In 14 days, the software learned to send New Year’s greetings to 600 friends in 4 minutes and post to social media, generating millions of views while its creator slept.
“When I work with people, no one acts immediately. With Sanwan, there’s no demand to plan or wait – changes happen instantly on command,” Fu Shen shared with the South China Morning Post. This has led to the emergence of “one-person companies,” where software replaces entire departments.
However, there are currently limited examples of sustained successful OpenClaw implementation in China.
Government Funding, Regulatory Caution
While Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang calls OpenClaw “probably the most important software release ever,” Chinese authorities are taking a cautious approach.
On one hand, Beijing officially supports AI agents in its annual government work report. Local governments in Shenzhen, Wuxi, and Hefei are showering developers with funding. In the Longgang district of Shenzhen, subsidies of up to 2 million yuan ($290,050) are available for projects in the OpenClaw ecosystem, while Wuxi offers up to 5 million yuan for industrial applications, Reuters reports.
Free housing and office space are also being offered to young talent.
This strategy reflects China’s significant investments in AI infrastructure and the development of cost-effective, open-source models. Tencent, which offers paid access to AI systems, is installing OpenClaw for free on user devices to leverage its services.
regulators are wary. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has warned that OpenClaw requires too much control over computer systems, creating risks of cyberattacks and data leaks – concerns already seen in the West.
Authorities have intervened. Government agencies and state-owned enterprises, including China’s largest banks, have received warnings against installing OpenClaw on their office devices. For certain employees in state banks and government agencies, the ban extends to personal phones connected to corporate networks, and, according to one source familiar with the matter, even to the families of military personnel, Bloomberg reports.
The irony is complete: while one hand of the state signs checks for millions to develop the technology, the other issues warnings about national security.
Hello China Tech notes that when ByteDance (the company behind TikTok) released a conceptually similar autonomous assistant for smartphones late last year, the regulatory response was swift and decisive, whereas the current reaction has been more ambivalent.
Between Productivity and Paranoia
The wave of enthusiasm in China has been powerful enough to send the stocks of companies linked to AI agents, such as UCloud Technology and Hangzhou Shunwang, up more than 9% on Monday, outpacing the CSI 300 index, Bloomberg reports.
Cloud giants ByteDance and Alibaba have also joined the race, offering ready-made cloud solutions for OpenClaw to “appease” security concerns.
But the question remains: is “raising lobsters” a path to unprecedented productivity, or a voluntary handover of the keys to our digital lives to algorithms of uncertain origin? While Western regulators often stifle innovation, in China, innovation often outpaces common sense.
As investment strategist Anna Wu told Bloomberg, we need to see real usage numbers, not just download statistics.
Because, no matter how clever a “lobster” is, it still needs someone who knows what they want to achieve – and when to pull the plug if the whole plot turns out to be much ado about nothing.
