OpenClaw is taking the Chinese tech scene by storm, and the speed of implementation and business hunger here are far crazier than in Silicon Valley.This AI agent tool has received over 260,000 stars on GitHub, making it one of the world’s top open source tools, with an influx of 2 million visitors in a single week. Not only can it directly take over your personal computer, but it can also help you schedule, write code, manage files across various software, and can even directly clone a tireless "AI work team" on the spot.

After entering the Chinese market, it caused a carnival among polar tourists from all over the country.Starting around the Spring Festival, screens full of nanny-level tutorials and crazy deployment cases have directly overwhelmed all major domestic social media.In a self-organized offline salon in Beijing, more than 300 entrepreneurs and programmers with shining eyes were squeezed into the salon.

Everyone is working like crazy to catch up and launch new projects based on OpenClaw quickly, because everyone knows that their enemies are also working on it overnight.. A participant who was shocked by the enthusiastic atmosphere at the scene lamented: In this era of AI explosion, there is only one consensus among scientific and technological people in China, and that is that they must not be left behind.

01Silicon Valley is still struggling with whether to close or not, but Chinese giants have fully accessed it.

OpenClaw caused a huge shock in Silicon Valley. Y Combinator CEO Jiaxing Chen and many partners at Andreessen Horowitz have become enthusiastic fans.

However, the attitude of major manufacturers is extremely ambiguous and conservative.Meta tried to poach its founder, Peter Steinberger, but he ended up joining OpenAI. Giants such as Google and Anthropic even directly block access to OpenClaw internally.

But in China, the script goes to the exact opposite extreme.

Domestic leading cloud vendors such as ByteDance's Volcano Engine, Alibaba Cloud, and Tencent Cloud almost immediately opened up cloud services running OpenClaw, directly entering the blank hinterland where American cloud giants are still waiting.

Tencent Cloud quickly published a document on its developer platform, announcing that it has launched a pre-configured OpenClaw application template, allowing users to deploy the AI ​​assistant in the cloud with a simple and fool-proof operation. Alibaba Cloud followed suit and announced that the agent can be seamlessly connected to multiple models of the Tongyi Qianwen series. ByteDance’s Volcano Engine directly issued detailed deployment environment guidelines and clearly delineated safety red lines.

Some Chinese developers with a keen sense of smell bluntly said that compared with spending a lot of money to buy expensive hardware and tossing it themselves, the cloud services provided by domestic manufacturers have completely eliminated the threshold for obtaining top AI productivity.

Baidu also plans to allow users to summon OpenClaw directly within the Baidu App to handle a full set of chores such as scheduling, file organization, and code writing. It is even ambitiously embedding its functions into e-commerce and other core business lines.

02 From applications to hardware: geeks start to “play”

The viral spread of OpenClaw is spawning new species like crazy.

Last month, Hangzhou AI startup Mindverse directly organized a five-day online hackathon using OpenClaw as its inspiration core.

In just five days, the wild imagination of geeks was completely detonated: someone created a dating app equivalent to the AI ​​version of Tinder, allowing the agent to directly select love partners on behalf of the user; someone created a subversive recruitment website, where the candidate's agent can directly play black box games with the employer's AI; someone even created a game-like application that allows the user's AI avatar to travel around the world in the virtual world, make friends and automatically write travel notes.

Mindverse co-founder and CEO Tao Fangbo said frankly that every founder he knows is now frantically trying new projects and frantically testing the capabilities of personal AI agents. Mindverse itself has received heavy financial support from Square Peg and China's Hony Capital, and is trying to build its platform Second Me into the strongest local competitor to OpenClaw.

Tao Fangbo plans to turn this online hackathon into a regular monthly carnival to stimulate developers to continue to squeeze out the application potential of AI agents. He is convinced that OpenClaw is just a catalyst for a larger AI wave, and will surely create a massive number of new platforms and service spaces in the future.

The start-up company Qveris has launched its own intelligent agent Qverisbot based on OpenClaw, which can directly call tools to perform real-world data tasks. Co-founder Qu Dongqi himself is even secretly running an independent project, trying to create a personal AI trader that can make decisive moves in the stock market and other financial markets.

Not only the software side, but also the long-dormant hardware manufacturers have caught wind of the trend and started to follow up frantically.In Guangzhou, smart device charger startup Candysign last week began allowing users to remotely take over charging devices by giving commands directly to OpenClaw-based agents through ByteDance’s popular social software. Users outside China can even control it directly through Telegram.

"Our company is a bunch of restless geeks and geeks, and plugging OpenClaw into our products is simply an instinctive reaction." Wilson Wang, co-founder of Candysign, made no secret of their ambitions.

Large model manufacturers are also not to be outdone. Last month, leading developers such as MiniMax and Moonshot AI began to embed the easy-to-access cloud version of OpenClaw into their products as a new tool for staking their claim. The huge and cheap open source model computing power in the Chinese market allows local entrepreneurs to start commercial monetization with OpenClaw at extremely low trial and error costs. For example, in early February, the K2.5 model of Dark Side of the Moon instantly became the absolute first choice for developers when calling OpenClaw through OpenRouter.

03Some people use it to expand business: the "AI team" carrying more than a dozen MacBooks to work

Chen Haopeng is a product manager for a large technology company in China. His side job is to mass-produce AI celebrity accounts on social media. When the OpenClaw craze swept across the country in January, what he saw was not only technology, but also an excellent outlet for rapidly expanding business territory.

Chen Haopeng decisively bought eight second-hand MacBook Airs and mounted different OpenClaw agents on each machine around the clock. These AIs have become top-notch employees who never need to sleep. They frantically use various tools to generate popular content in batches and respond to fan comments in seconds. According to the screenshots he shared, some posts automatically distributed by AI have racked up tens of thousands of likes per post.

"My OpenClaw employees never complain and have no emotional infighting. Even if you wake them up at 4 a.m. to work, they can complete the work perfectly within a few minutes." Chen Haopeng made no secret of the pleasure of this kind of technical dimensionality reduction. When he goes out, he will even take this "cyber team" with him, stuffing all his notebooks into a huge backpack and carrying it with him. “It’s heavy, but I enjoy being in control.”

Just a few days ago, he purchased three more second-hand computers to continue to expand. He is making a wild bet: The huge profits brought about by scale will far exceed the meager hardware costs of maintaining these agents.

04 Security Warning: Data security risks cannot be ignored

As this craze continues to heat up, its safety risks have also attracted attention.The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has sounded the alarm, clearly stating that if improperly configured, OpenClaw will cause catastrophic security vulnerabilities, directly exposing users to fatal cyber attacks and data leakage risks.

This is by no means alarmist. The reason why OpenClaw is so powerful is that it has supreme permissions across underlying applications and needs to have unbridled access to your private files, login credentials and even browsing history. ByteDance's Volcano Engine directly gave a red warning in the deployment guide: "Because this tool has extremely terrifying data and network access rights, please be sure to isolate it in a dedicated environment, strictly prohibit processing of sensitive information, and immediately add the most stringent physical shackles to ECS and API keys."

Cybersecurity experts have also issued warnings one after another that high-privilege agents like OpenClaw can easily become targets of "prompt word injection" attacks. With just a few hidden instructions, a hacker can directly instigate AI to give away your core business secrets, or even post wildly online under your account.

A blogger with the online name "Programmer Ya Ge" made an outrageous statement on Xiaohongshu to reveal the truth: using OpenClaw without protection is equivalent to letting your data run naked on the streets of the Internet.

05The craze continues: The future opened by OpenClaw

Despite growing privacy and security concerns, Chinese users' enthusiasm for OpenClaw's agents does not appear to have waned. On Xiaohongshu, posts and demonstration videos focusing on OpenClaw are still proliferating.

"My experience is really shocking," user "Teacher Du" wrote, adding that these agents can handle "a variety of tasks." "The concept of real AI employees is getting closer and closer to us."

Tao Fangbo believes that everything OpenClaw has started has had an irreversible impact on the Chinese AI entrepreneur community. He believes that there will be broad space for new platforms and services in the future.

From Yun Dachang opening its doors to welcome customers overnight in order to grab land, to hard-core geeks carrying more than a dozen laptops running around the streets to run data, to national regulatory authorities issuing emergency safety notices, OpenClaw's rapid development in China in just one month reflects the speed and complexity of the implementation of AI technology.

When your AI can already help you find partners online, find jobs, speculate in U.S. stocks, and even travel around the world, the doomsday crisis of human workers may really be around the corner.

But when the carnival of geeks gradually subsides, how to make this rapidly expanding AI wave have a safe and soft landing is the real test that all OpenClaw followers cannot avoid.