Lobsters are indeed popping up in all places in China right away—on and offline. In February, for example, the entrepreneur and tech influencer Fu Sheng hosted a livestream showing off OpenClaw’s capabilities that got 20,000 views. And just last weekend, Xie attended three different OpenClaw events in Shenzhen, each drawing greater than 500 people. These self-organized, unofficial gatherings feature power users, influencers, and sometimes enterprise capitalists as speakers. The largest event Xie attended, on March 7, drew greater than 1,000 people; within the packed venue, he says, people were shoulder to shoulder, with many attendees unable to even get a seat.
Now China’s AI giants are beginning to piggyback on the trend too, promoting their models, APIs, and cloud services (which will be used with OpenClaw), in addition to their very own OpenClaw-like agents. Earlier this month, Tencent held a public event offering free installation support for OpenClaw, drawing long lines of individuals waiting for help, including elderly users and youngsters.
This sudden burst in popularity has even prompted local governments to become involved. Earlier this month the federal government of Longgang, a district in Shenzhen, released several policies to support OpenClaw-related ventures, including free computing credits and money rewards for standout projects. Other cities, including Wuxi, have begun rolling out similar measures.
These policies only catalyze what’s already within the air. “It was not until my father, who’s 77, asked me to assist install a ‘lobster’ for him that I spotted this thing is actually viral,” says Henry Li, a software engineer based in Beijing.
A programmer gold rush
What’s making this moment particularly lucrative for individuals with technical skills, like Feng, is that so many individuals want OpenClaw, but not nearly as many have the capabilities to access it. Setting it up requires a level of technical knowledge most individuals don’t possess, from typing commands right into a black terminal window to navigating unfamiliar developer platforms. On the hardware side, an older or budget laptop may struggle to run it easily. And if the tool just isn’t installed on a tool separate from someone’s on a regular basis computer, or if the info accessible to OpenClaw just isn’t properly partitioned, the user’s privacy could possibly be in danger—opening the door to data leaks and even malicious attacks.
