After navigating a series of hurdles from registration and payment to setting up a “gateway,” Wang, a 35-year-old content director at one of China’s biggest tech companies finally managed to get OpenClaw up and running on his desktop.
The challenges, which nearly all Chinese users face when trying to install the viral artificial intelligence agent, felt worth it.
On the evening of March 11, while commuting from work, Wang asked OpenClaw to find a way to make money through writing articles on WeChat using the tool. When he got home, a series of active research tabs and a meticulously drafted ten-page manual were waiting on his monitor. The sheer efficiency of the task, completed entirely in his absence, left him stunned.
“This agent is incredible. It can operate your computer and get work done even when you’re not around, and the quality is extremely good,” Wang told Nikkei Asia, asking to be identified only by his surname. “A lot of people will lose their jobs because of this AI.”
It is this frictionless utility that is driving the viral adoption of OpenClaw in China, with even local governments now scrambling to popularize it despite repeated warnings from central government agencies about the security risks of the Western-developed AI tool.
The government of Shenzhen’s Longgang district hosted an “OpenClaw conference” on March 14 in partnership with Moonshot AI, one of China’s leading AI startups that introduced its own version of OpenClaw, Kimi Claw, last month. Engineers from the company provided free OpenClaw installations for attendees and distributed trial access to Kimi Claw.
The district is also offering free services to help users deploy OpenClaw and is encouraging companies to either purchase or build their own OpenClaw-based agent solutions, with annual subsidies of up to RMB 2 million (USD 289,436) per company. The district plans to select top-performing OpenClaw applications each year, offering awards of up to RMB 1 million (USD 144,718).
Other local governments have introduced similar incentives in the past week. For example, Hefei’s High-Tech Zone in Anhui introduced 15 measures aimed at supporting the development of open-source AI projects such as OpenClaw, with funding of up to RMB 10 million (USD 1.4 million). The initiative also seeks to promote a new “AI plus super individual,” also known as the one-person company (OPC) business model, as unemployment remains a worry across the country amid an economic slowdown.
Changshu in Jiangsu has unveiled 13 similar measures, including free end-to-end deployment and training services for OpenClaw users and awards for good OpenClaw applications.
The frenzy mirrors the state-led rush to integrate DeepSeek just one year ago, when local governments raced to use the model for everything from drafting documents and analyzing data to answering public queries and drawing up policies.
“I think a lot of these moves are simply following the trend, because everything now has to be tied to artificial intelligence,” an official in an eastern province in China, who asked not to be named, told Nikkei Asia. She added that her city has also set up a special AI task force, with nine working groups staffed by officials seconded from different departments, and will soon roll out policies related to OpenClaw as well.
“AI does make some things more convenient, for example, writing official documents is easier than before, but in terms of industrial development, even our whole province doesn’t really have much of a foundation. The only direction we can realistically pursue is adding a few more AI application scenarios,” she said.
“But you have to talk about AI all the time, otherwise you may appear to lag behind,” she added.
Though facing obstacles in obtaining advanced chips from Nvidia due to US export controls, AI is at the top of Beijing’s agenda. Policymakers are actively deploying state support to accelerate the country’s AI development, and they have set “embodied AI” as a target industry in the country’s latest five-year plan (2026–2030) for economic development.
The official added that though her government frantically pushed the adoption of DeepSeek one year ago, now they are mostly using ByteDance’s Doubao, which they think is more suitable for their daily work. “Talk of DeepSeek has quietly died down,” she said.
DeepSeek has not yet released its long-delayed V4 model, though the Financial Times previously reported that the Hangzhou-based company would release it before the National People’s Congress that kicked off on March 5.
While OpenClaw continues to cause a stir in China, Chinese companies, from established giants such as Tencent and Huawei to startups like Moonshot and Z.ai (Zhipu AI), have all launched their own versions of the viral tool in the past week, packaging their offerings as “one-click installers.”
The key difference between their products and OpenClaw is that the Chinese versions replace the system’s “brain” with Chinese large language models so that the data processing takes place either on domestic servers or locally, which should address many of Beijing’s data security concerns.
This article first appeared on Nikkei Asia. It has been republished here as part of 36Kr’s ongoing partnership with Nikkei.
Note: RMB figures are converted to USD at rates of RMB 6.91 = USD 1 based on estimates as of March 16, 2026, unless otherwise stated. USD conversions are presented for ease of reference and may not fully match prevailing exchange rates.