Shenzhen Mass Installs: OpenClaw Goes Viral in China

Nearly 1,000 people lined up outside Tencent’s headquarters in Shenzhen this March for one thing: OpenClaw. Engineers from Tencent’s cloud unit helped students, retirees, and office workers deploy the open-source AI agent built by Peter Steinberger — and the craze has not slowed since.

Chinese cloud giants including Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, ByteDance’s Volcano Engine, JD.com, and Baidu have all embraced OpenClaw or spun up their own “Claw” frameworks. Tencent launched WorkBuddy, Minimax shipped MaxClaw, and MoonShot built Kimi Claw. Local governments are getting in on the action too — Shenzhen’s Longgang district offered grants to startups building OpenClaw apps.

The phrase “raise a lobster” (referencing OpenClaw’s red lobster logo) has become shorthand for setting up an AI agent. The craze aligns with China’s broader push toward open-source AI, which has helped domestic labs build developer credibility and gain global traction. In February, Chinese AI models for the first time surpassed U.S. models in share of tokens processed among the top nine models on AI marketplace OpenRouter, according to HSBC.

Steinberger, who built OpenClaw as an “agentic harness” — connecting AI models to tools like email, calendars, and messaging apps — was subsequently hired by OpenAI. The framework lets users run a personal AI agent locally that can check email,自动回复消息, and book reservations on their behalf.

The Shenzhen install events have spawned a cottage industry of their own, with third-party installers helping普通用户 get set up with the open-source framework.