OpenClaw craze: China’s ‘raise a lobster’ AI trend pushes cloud stock up

The Openclaw moment has finally reached China as hundreds of thousands of Chinese are rushing to adopt the autonomous AI agent for various personalized tasks.

Chinese tech firms, including Alibaba, Tancent and Baidu are behind this OpenAI mania as these companies have launched “on-ramp” services to make the software easier to install. Tancent recently began offering free installation on its cloud platform.

Users are “raising the lobster,” a nickname for adopting tech, to handle every task ranging from coding to personal assistant tasks.

Government initiatives

Even the Chinese government has thrown its support behind the adoption of OpenClaw. For instance, Shenzhen’s Longgang district has announced plan to seek public feedback on a draft policy, encouraging the professional platforms to offer free-of-cost OpenClaw services. It has also proposed subsidies of up to 2 million yuan for app development.

The eastern Chinese city of Wuxi has also offered up to 5 million yuan in subsidies for tech breakthroughs using OpenClaw in robotics and industrial sectors.

For the first time, AI agents were included in the Chinese government’s annual work report, with Premier Li Qiang calling for their "large-scale commercial application.

“We will promote faster application of new-generation intelligent terminals and AI agents, and encourage large-scale commercial application of AI in key sectors and fields, so as to foster new forms and models of AI-native business,” Qiang said.

As a result of OpenClaw’s surging hype, the Chinese tech firms’ shares witnessed a sharp 20 percent jump, outperforming the broader CSI 300 Index. The shares of Hong Kong’s MiniMax also soared 20 percent.

Growing privacy concerns

The Chinese regulators have voiced the concerns regarding security and privacy risks. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology warned about the security risks, such as data breaches and cyber attacks posed by OpenClaw due to improper configuration.

According to cybersecurity experts, the AI tool is capable of accessing private data, communicating externally and exposing it to harmful content, which the researchers called it “lethal trifecta.”

There are also the reports of the AI spamming users with hundreds of messages after gaining access to iMessage.

What is OpenClaw?

OpenClaw, formerly called as Moltbot or Clawdbot, is an autonomous AI agent capable of managing emails, calendars, travel check-ins, and restaurant reservations.

The app is developed by Austrian programmer Peter Steinberger. Last month, the autonomous AI agent was acquired by OpenAI.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also called OpenClaw a “single most important release of software probably ever.”