China’s OpenClaw Surge: A Gold Rush for AI Enterprises

George Zhang believed that OpenClaw could make him wealthy, despite not fully grasping the mechanics of the viral AI agent software. After watching a video of a Chinese influencer showcasing its capabilities in managing stock portfolios and making autonomous investment decisions, Zhang, who works in cross-border e-commerce in Xiamen, became so intrigued that he opted to install OpenClaw in late February.

Zhang is among many in China who have recently been caught up in the OpenClaw frenzy. Workshops aimed at teaching users how to utilize the AI agent have sprung up in cities nationwide, attracting crowds numbering in the hundreds. Tech companies are racing to incorporate OpenClaw into their services, and local governments are offering subsidies for entrepreneurs creating products using it. Just last week, viral images of senior citizens queuing to install the software circulated widely online.

After renting a cloud server from Tencent and subscribing to the Chinese large language model Kimi, Zhang began interacting with his OpenClaw agent, affectionately referred to as his “lobster,” in line with local terminology. Initially, Zhang was impressed as he observed the AI agent swiftly produce in-depth market analyses based on breaking news. However, a few days later, his lobster began to lag, providing only a basic outline of market trends rather than a comprehensive report. When he requested it to recreate the more detailed report from the first day, the agent repeatedly replied that it was “working on it” but never delivered any results.

Zhang concluded that OpenClaw isn’t tailored for users lacking coding skills like himself. “It would tell me I needed to set up the API port. That’s a technical task—not something I can tackle without a step-by-step tutorial,” he remarks. Ultimately, he abandoned the idea of using his lobster for stock trading and pivoted to having it aggregate news on the AI industry, which he then utilized to create a content platform on WeChat.

This week, I reached out to several OpenClaw users in China to hear about their experiences, revealing a distinct divide between those who are tech-savvy and those who are not. Users proficient in AI view OpenClaw as a transformative tool for productivity, while those without a technical background often feel misled by promises of a remarkably powerful AI product that failed to meet their expectations. By the time the initial excitement faded, many had already begun incurring costs for cloud servers and LLM tokens.

The true impetus behind the OpenClaw craze in China isn’t the everyday users, but the companies poised to gain financially from its widespread use. Major tech players like Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, Minimax, Moonshot, and Z.ai see this AI productivity trend as a unique opportunity to entice the general public into paying for AI services, and they are cashing in on the biggest benefits.

“A chatbot consumes only a few hundred tokens per conversation; a single active OpenClaw instance can use tens or even hundreds of times more tokens each day,” explains Poe Zhao, a tech analyst and founder of the newsletter Hello China Tech. Each new OpenClaw user translates to someone who’s incurring costs 24/7 for LLM API calls. “That’s why Tencent engineers were setting up stations outside their headquarters to assist people with installations for free,” he adds.

“I Couldn’t Grasp Any of It”

Song Zhuoqun, a college student in China, encountered issues with OpenClaw the moment she attempted to install it. Although she is a social media intern at an AI startup, she lacks programming experience, which made figuring out how to get OpenClaw operational quite challenging. She asked Doubao, ByteDance’s popular AI chatbot, for a step-by-step tutorial, but found it to be of little assistance.

“There were pages full of code, and I didn’t comprehend any of it. I kept requesting the AI to generate a response for me, then I’d paste it in, run it, and it would give an error, prompting me to try another response,” she shares. The installation process ultimately became the most frustrating aspect of her experience with OpenClaw, leaving her feeling as though she hadn’t learned anything meaningful.