‘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’ reputation among the developer community and slowly helped models work their way into global business. 

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. 

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