Lobsters are currently popping up everywhere in China, both online and offline. In February, for example, business and tech influencer Fu Sheng hosted a livestream demonstrating OpenClaw’s capabilities that received 20,000 views. And just last weekend, Xie attended three different OpenClaw events in Shenzhen, each attended by more than 500 people. These self-organized, unofficial gatherings feature influencers, influencers, and sometimes venture capitalists as speakers. On March 7, Xi attended the largest event, attended by more than 1,000 people. He says that people were standing shoulder to shoulder in the overcrowded venue, many participants could not even get a seat.
Now China’s AI giants have also started promoting their own models, APIs, and cloud services (which can be used with OpenClaw), as well as their own OpenClaw-like agents. Earlier this month, Tencent held a public event offering free installation support for OpenClaw, which drew long lines of people waiting for help, including elderly users and children.
This sudden burst in popularity has prompted local governments to get involved. Earlier this month the government of Longgang, a district in Shenzhen, issued a number of policies to support OpenClaw-related projects, including free computing credits and cash rewards for standout projects. Other cities, including Wuxi, have also started similar measures.
These policies only activate what is already in the air. “It wasn’t until my father, who is 77, asked me to help him install ‘Lobster’ that I realized this thing was really viral,” says Henry Li, a software engineer based in Beijing.
A programmer gold rush
What makes this moment especially rewarding for tech-savvy people, like Fang, is that a lot of people want OpenClaw, but the capabilities to access it aren’t nearly as great. Setting it up requires a level of technical knowledge that most people don’t have, from typing commands into a black terminal window to navigating unfamiliar developer platforms. On the hardware side, an older or budget laptop might struggle to run it smoothly. And if the tool isn’t installed on a device separate from one’s everyday computer, or if data accessible to OpenClaw isn’t properly distributed, user privacy can be at risk—opening the door to data leaks and even malicious attacks.