Tencent sponsors OpenClaw after creator’s complaints of copying

Tencent and its cloud computing unit officially became sponsors of OpenClaw on Monday, as featured on the project’s GitHub page alongside OpenAI and Chinese AI giant Baidu. The GitHub page has a section that lists the project’s sponsors.

Earlier on Sunday, an account belonging to Tencent Cloud Lighthouse – the tech giant’s team offering “one-click” OpenClaw set-up for developers – appeared as a sponsor of the project on GitHub.

The move came after Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, last Thursday publicly complained about Tencent copying skills from his project without supporting it financially or technically.

Tencent responded to Steinberger’s post on X by saying that the company’s SkillHub community was a local mirror for Chinese developers that had credited OpenClaw’s ClawHub as the original source of the skills.

The Shenzhen-based company added that its team members had contributed code to the open-source project and pledged to “become a better sponsor”.