Article: OpenClaw fever: why is China rushing to ‘raise a lobster’? | Meridiano

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Article: OpenClaw fever: why is China rushing to ‘raise a lobster’?

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5 / 10

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A surge of public enthusiasm in China is driving the rapid adoption of OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent software, for tasks ranging from coding to report writing. This trend has moved beyond developers to include ordinary consumers, despite growing global and local concerns about AI's disruptive potential and privacy issues.

Tech giant Tencent is capitalizing on this demand, recently hosting a free installation event at its Shenzhen headquarters that drew nearly a thousand diverse attendees. Users describe the technology as providing "virtual staff" that significantly reduces their workload.

The main topics covered are the widespread public adoption of OpenClaw in China, the involvement of tech companies like Tencent in promoting it, and the contrasting sentiments of enthusiasm versus concern regarding AI's impact.

Original URL

https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3345865/openclaw-fever-why-china-rushing-raise-lobster?utm_source=rss_feed

Source Feed

Tech - South China Morning Post

Published Date

2026-03-08 14:00

Fetched Date

2026-03-08 11:30

Processed Date

2026-03-08 11:31

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Present

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Not Clustered

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OpenClaw fever: why is China rushing to ‘raise a lobster’?
Chinese consumers are using OpenClaw for everything from stock picking and report writing to slide decks, emails and coding
As global concern rises over artificial intelligence and the potential for AI agents to disrupt lives and industries, people in southern China are rushing to embrace the technology even as privacy concerns intensify.
On Friday, nearly 1,000 people lined up outside Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings’ Shenzhen headquarters to install OpenClaw – a popular open-source AI agent software – on their computers.
The crowd, a mix of amateur developers, retired space engineers, housewives, students and AI enthusiasts, gathered following an invitation from Tencent’s cloud-computing unit, with the company’s engineers installing the software for free. Meanwhile, social media was awash with posts offering the same service for fees ranging from tens to hundreds of yuan.
Tencent’s initiative reflects the latest effort from a Chinese tech company to capitalise on surging enthusiasm for OpenClaw, which has spilled beyond the developer community to hobbyists and ordinary users.
Mark Yang, a Shanghai-based designer and early OpenClaw adopter, said with the AI assistant it felt like having “virtual staff” that handled assignments and reduced workload.