China’s OpenClaw Boom Is a Gold Rush for AI Companies

OpenClaw, an AI agent software promising autonomous investment management, sparked a massive craze across China with workshops drawing hundreds and viral videos of elderly people installing it. However, most non-technical users discovered the software requires coding skills and generates costly cloud server and AI model subscription fees, with many paying around $30 just to get started before abandoning their "lobsters" due to technical difficulties. Chinese tech giants like Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance are the real winners, profiting from AI service subscriptions as OpenClaw consumes vastly more computing tokens than regular chatbots.