China's Tech Giants Race to Deploy OpenClaw as Adoption Surpasses US
# China's Tech Giants Race to Deploy OpenClaw as Adoption Surpasses US *Local governments dangle million-dollar subsidies despite Beijing's security warnings* --- When Peter Steinberger built OpenClaw in late 2025, the Austrian developer had modest goals: create an AI agent that could actually...
China's Tech Giants Race to Deploy OpenClaw as Adoption Surpasses US
Local governments dangle million-dollar subsidies despite Beijing's security warnings
When Peter Steinberger built OpenClaw in late 2025, the Austrian developer had modest goals: create an AI agent that could actually do work on your behalf, running locally on your machine. Eighteen months later, the lobster-themed open-source project has surpassed Linux to become the most-starred repository on GitHub — and China has gone all in.
Usage of OpenClaw in China has now surpassed the United States, according to American cybersecurity firm SecurityScorecard. The surge has prompted a curious contradiction: while Beijing's regulators have issued multiple warnings about the tool's security risks — going so far as to restrict its use at banks and government agencies — local governments and tech giants are racing to adopt it.
"This is like the 2022 ChatGPT moment. This is like the 2025 DeepSeek moment," said Jaylen He, CEO of Violoop, a Shenzhen-based startup building hardware agents. "The craving for a personal assistant that can really help the user — the desire has been there, and has been suppressed for a very long time."
The installation economy
What distinguishes this wave from previous AI adoptions in China is the infrastructure being built around it. Tencent, the country's largest tech company, launched a full suite of OpenClaw-powered products last week, dubbed internally as "lobster special forces" — complete with integration into WeChat, the superapp with over a billion users. ByteDance's cloud unit Volcano Engine released ArkClaw, a browser-based version that eliminates the need for complex local setup. Zhipu AI launched a local version offering "one-click installation" with over 50 pre-installed skills.
The installation process itself has become a cottage industry. Tencent held a free in-person setup session in Shenzhen last week, helping "hundreds" of people deploy the tool on TencentCloud. JD.com launched a dedicated page where users can pay 399 yuan ($58) for remote assistance from Lenovo's IT team to install OpenClaw. At Baidu's Beijing headquarters, engineers helped employees install the tool en masse — the company's cafeteria even distributed red lobster plush toys.
The phenomenon has a name: "raise a lobster," a play on the project's red crustacean mascot and the Chinese phrase for nurturing something valuable.
The security paradox
China's national cybersecurity agency issued a second warning this week, cautioning that OpenClaw has "extremely weak default security configuration" and could inadvertently leak, delete, or misuse user data once granted permissions. State-owned enterprises and government agencies have been restricted from running the tool on office computers.
Yet the same week, Shenzhen's Longgang district and Hefei's high-tech development zone announced equity financing support of up to 10 million yuan ($1.46 million) for startups building OpenClaw applications. A district in Suzhou pledged 30 days of free office space, accommodation, and meals for OpenClaw developers.
The tension reflects a broader reality: Chinese-made AI models have closed the capability gap with U.S. rivals while offering significantly lower prices. According to OpenRouter, the top three tools used by OpenClaw users on its marketplace in the past month were all Chinese companies — their combined usage double that of the three most-used Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude models.
"In terms of adopting new technologies, China definitely has a really large community that always wants to try what's new and doesn't want to be left behind," said He.
The creator's journey
The irony of OpenClaw's China momentum isn't lost on its creator. Steinberger, who joined OpenAI in mid-February after the project went viral, spent 13 years bootstrapping PDF rendering company PSPDFKit — code that still powers PDF functionality on over a billion devices for companies including Apple and Dropbox.
The 2021 exit, when PSPDFKit raised its $116M funding round and the founders stepped back from day-to-day operations, left him burned out. "I felt like Austin Powers where they suck the mojo out," he told podcaster Lex Fridman. "I couldn't get code out anymore. I was just, like, staring and feeling empty."
He traveled, tried therapy, and considered the exit a permanent retirement. Then, in April 2025, he built a Twitter analysis tool and felt the spark return. "I discovered that AI had undergone a paradigm shift" — the repetitive plumbing of code could now be handled by models, freeing him to focus on building.
OpenClaw was the result. He built it with a "local-first" architecture, allowing users to run assistants on their own hardware and store memories in simple Markdown files rather than corporate clouds. The project underwent multiple rebranding cycles — from Clawdbot to Moltbot to OpenClaw. The original name "Clawd" drew a trademark complaint from Anthropic, which argued it was too similar to "Claude." During the brief window when Steinberger's GitHub handle was available after the rename, crypto scammers hijacked it.
Now, with Steinberger at OpenAI and an independent open-source foundation in the works, the project he created to keep data on users' machines is driving unprecedented adoption in the world's largest market — even as that market's government warns against it.
The lobster, it seems, has outgrown the tank.
Primary source: CNBC (Anniek Bao), with additional reporting from Fortune, Bloomberg, Reuters, and The Register. Security data from SecurityScorecard and OpenRouter.
