On a Friday afternoon in March, nearly 1,000 people stood in line outside Tencent’s headquarters in Shenzhen to get a piece of software — OpenClaw — installed on their laptops by Tencent engineers.

That scene, reported by Fortune, captures the scale of what’s unfolding in China’s AI sector right now. OpenClaw — the open-source AI agent framework built by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger and now backed by OpenAI — has gone fully viral in China. And a new platform called DuClaw is pouring fuel on the fire by eliminating the last barrier to entry: local setup.

DuClaw: Run an Agent from Your Browser

DuClaw, developed by a Chinese team, strips out the technical overhead entirely. Instead of pulling a repo, configuring environment variables, and running a local server, users open a browser tab and have an OpenClaw-compatible agent running in seconds. No terminal. No deployment. No servers.

OpenClaw’s standard setup still requires enough comfort with command-line tools to scare off most non-developers. DuClaw reduces that to a point-and-click experience — which, in a market of 1.4 billion people with high smartphone penetration and strong appetite for AI tools, changes the adoption math considerably.

The platform is covered in detail via YouTube, walking through how anyone can spin up an agent workflow without touching infrastructure.

The “Raise a Lobster” Moment

Chinese users have adopted a phrase for getting into OpenClaw: “raise a lobster,” a nod to the framework’s red lobster logo. The term has taken on a life of its own — part tech trend, part cultural meme — spreading across Chinese social platforms and turning an open-source agent harness into a consumer phenomenon.

The mechanics of OpenClaw are worth understanding here. The framework takes a model (like Alibaba’s Qwen, MoonShot’s Kimi, or any number of Chinese-built LLMs), wraps it with memory, tool integrations, and task-decomposition logic, and turns it into an agent capable of managing email, calendars, messaging apps, and more. That composability is exactly why it’s landed so well in China, where local cloud providers have rushed to offer their own flavored versions.

Tencent has WorkBuddy. Minimax has MaxClaw. MoonShot has Kimi Claw. ByteDance, Alibaba, Baidu, JD.com — all have either embraced OpenClaw or shipped derivatives of it. Local governments are not waiting either: Shenzhen’s Longgang district is offering grants up to 10 million yuan ($1.4 million) for startups building OpenClaw apps; Wuxi is dangling 5 million yuan for OpenClaw-powered robotics breakthroughs.

The Numbers Behind the Buzz

China’s adoption isn’t just loud — it’s showing up in data. In early February, Chinese AI models for the first time surpassed U.S. models in share of tokens processed among the top nine models on AI marketplace OpenRouter, according to HSBC data cited by Fortune.

MiniMax, one of the key model providers fueling the OpenClaw ecosystem, saw its stock rise 27.4% in a single week following the craze. Its shares are now up more than 600% from its IPO earlier this year, despite posting a net loss of $1.8 billion on $79 million in revenue for 2025 — an illustration of how investor sentiment in the sector is almost entirely divorced from current profitability.

Tencent’s stock climbed 8.9% over the same period.

What the West Gets Wrong About This

In Western markets, OpenClaw’s growth has been tempered by legitimate security concerns — prompt injection attacks, agents leaking financial data, deleted emails and code libraries. Those risks are real and documented.

But China’s high-tech adoption culture operates on different priors. As Jan Wuppermann, head of AI for NTT Data, put it to Fortune: “There’s a mindset I often hear from everyday Chinese friends: It’s there anyway, I may as well use it.”

DuClaw slots into that mindset perfectly. Friction is the enemy of adoption. A browser-based agent platform removes the last excuse not to try.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky acknowledged last year that his company runs Alibaba’s Qwen model for customer service — calling it “very good, fast, and cheap.” China’s open-source AI stack is already embedded in global business, and with platforms like DuClaw eliminating setup friction entirely, the adoption curve is only getting steeper.

Sources: Fortune — ‘Raise a lobster’: How OpenClaw is the latest craze transforming China’s AI sector | DuClaw Overview via YouTube