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

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.