‘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.

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’ reput...