Open-source AI agents capable of autonomously controlling a device have found an unlikely mass audience in China, and a small group of technically fluent early adopters is profiting from the gap between public demand and public capability.
The tool at the center of this moment is OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent that takes over a device and completes tasks autonomously on behalf of a user. Chinese users have nicknamed it “lobster” — a reference to its logo — and the phrase “have you raised a lobster yet?” has become a fixture of tech conversations across the country over the past month, according to the report. The tool began as a niche interest among software engineers in January and has since spread to lawyers, doctors, elderly users, and children.
Feng Qingyang, a 27-year-old Beijing-based software engineer, recognized the arbitrage early. After starting to experiment with OpenClaw in January, he opened a store on Xianyu — a secondhand marketplace — advertising remote installation support priced at 248 RMB (approximately $34) per order, with a promise of completion within 30 minutes and no coding knowledge required. By the end of February he had quit his full-time job. His operation has since grown to more than 100 employees and has fulfilled 7,000 orders. “Opportunities are always fleeting,” Feng says. “As programmers, we are the first to feel the winds shift.”
From Niche Tool to Public Phenomenon
The scale of offline interest has become conspicuous. Xie Manrui, a 36-year-old Shenzhen-based software engineer who has built open-source tools on top of the OpenClaw ecosystem — including one that visualizes the agent’s activity as an animated desktop worker and another enabling voice chat — attended three separate OpenClaw community events in Shenzhen last weekend, each drawing more than 500 attendees. The largest, held on March 7, drew over 1,000 people to a venue where, Xie says, attendees were standing shoulder to shoulder with many unable to find seats. These gatherings are self-organized and feature power users, influencers, and venture capitalists.
Established players are moving to capture the momentum. Tencent held a public event offering free OpenClaw installation support, drawing lines that included elderly users and children. China’s major AI companies more broadly have begun promoting their models, APIs, and cloud services as compatible with the tool, alongside launching their own comparable agents.
Government Involvement and Systemic Risk
Local governments have entered the picture as well. The Longgang district of Shenzhen released policies specifically supporting OpenClaw-related ventures, including free computing credits and cash rewards for standout projects. The city of Wuxi has begun rolling out similar measures. The policy response reflects how quickly the tool has moved from developer circles into mainstream awareness — a shift captured by one data point in the report: Henry Li, a Beijing-based software engineer, says the moment he knew the trend had become genuinely viral was when his 77-year-old father asked him to install a “lobster.”
The report notes, however, that this enthusiasm carries meaningful security risks, which the surge in non-technical adoption makes harder to manage. The cottage industry now filling that gap — installation services, preconfigured hardware, remote support operations — exists precisely because setup requires a level of technical knowledge that most users drawn to the tool do not have.
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This article is a curated summary based on third-party sources. Source: Read the original article
