China has taken to OpenClaw in a way that no other country has. People are queuing outside Baidu and Tencent offices to get the tool on their laptops. Local governments give grants to start-ups to build products on.
A software engineer in Beijing told MIT Technology Review that his 77-year-old father asked him to invent a “lobster” – the nickname of Chinese users for the tool, after its logo. In the US and EU, adoption has been very quiet. That comparison isn’t accidental, and understanding it tells you something useful about how agent AI is spreading.
How does OpenClaw work?
OpenClaw is a free, open source AI agent developed by Austrian programmer Peter Steinberger and first released in November 2025.
It is not the AI ​​model itself. You plug it into the Large Language Model (LLM) of your choice, and OpenClaw handles the execution: breaks the goal down into steps, connects to tools like your email or calendar, and tracks what’s already been done.
Tell survey providers, write outreach emails, and document results, and it handles all of that without you having to manage each step. As of early March 2026, the project had surpassed 248,000 GitHub stars, surpassing React and Linux on the starred list, according to research by Guolian Minsheng Securities.
Why is OpenClaw popular in China?
Several things have been aligned with OpenClaw in China, allowing the framework to gain widespread popularity despite government concerns about security issues. Let’s try to understand why, before we talk about why it has not received the same acceptance in the EU or the USA.
Local governments offer their support
Beijing’s AI strategy, unveiled last summer, targets the deployment of AI in 90 percent of industries and throughout society by 2030. That gave local governments and government-backed companies a clear incentive to get news of AI adoption fast.
When interest in OpenClaw grew in early 2026, Shenzhen’s Longgang district announced free computer credits and cash prizes for OpenClaw projects. Wuxi and other cities followed with funding of up to one million from prominent donors, according to Sixth Tone. Tencent organized social inclusion sessions in Shenzhen that attracted retirees and students; Baidu held similar events in Beijing.
As the Diplomat reported, local governments and large technology companies were the deliberate builders of this momentum, planning their time to show signs since the political conference of the Two Events. China has overtaken the US in the use of OpenClaw, according to the American internet security company SecurityScorecard, but a significant part of that adoption has been legally coordinated rather than independently conducted.
Running costs are very low
An effective barrier to OpenClaw in many markets is the cost of implementation. An agent queries a large language model continuously, and those API costs add up quickly. For most Western users, that means paying OpenAI or Anthropic prices.
Chinese users have a cheaper alternative. Domestic AI labs have released open source models that are capable at a fraction of the price of their US counterparts. According to OpenRouter data cited by CNBC, the three most used models among OpenClaw users in the marketplace last month were Chinese, with a combined use of twice that of the top models Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude. The low cost of thinking makes it easier for many people to manage the agent continuously.
Work anxiety causes adoption
China’s enthusiasm for OpenClaw isn’t just excitement about new technology. A May 2025 survey by the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business found 85.5% of nearly 12,000 Chinese respondents were concerned about how AI could affect their work. Youth unemployment is expected to increase between 15% and 19% by 2025, and the hashtag #AIAnxiety has attracted an estimated 2.6 million views on RedNote, Worldwide.
The concept of a “one-person company” has caught on as a result: a single person using an AI agent to manage, market, and communicate without additional staff. “Human workers need to rest, but OpenClaw can work 24/7,” user Wang Xiaoyan told CNBC. For workers worried about unemployment, learning the tool sounds like a hedge.
Researchers are very cautious. Jiang Han, a senior researcher at Beijing think tank Pangoal, told Sixth Tone that for many people, OpenClaw is still a hobbyist’s toy rather than a practical business tool. Setup is difficult for non-technical users, costs are high, and an agent can cause real damage if given untested access to systems.
Why can’t they compete in the same way in the EU or the US
GDPR, CCPA, and similar laws make it legally difficult to give an AI agent broad access to email, calendars, and messaging apps, which is exactly what OpenClaw requires. There is no institutional push compared to the coordinated output of the Chinese government, and until recently, the cheapest models were American ones, making continued use expensive.
China’s official media has cited privacy laws and API costs as the main reasons the West hasn’t seen the same madness, as noted by The Diplomat. That explains part of the gap. It does not take into account the fact that China’s innovation was actively produced from the top down, which many countries have not attempted.
There are still obstacles
The central government has banned state-owned enterprises, banks, and government agencies from using OpenClaw on office computers, citing security risks that China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology flagged in February 2026. Cybersecurity researchers have documented the risks, including rapid injection attacks and data extraction through third-party integration.
Regular users have raised concerns, too. “It’s hard for us regular people to know what access we’ve given and what you’ve taken,” new user Gong Zheng told CNBC. We can echo that concern for anyone testing agent AI tools. The enthusiasm for OpenClaw is real, but so are the risks, and they don’t go away because the local government subsidizes its use.
