Over the past month, major Chinese cloud providers debuted their own version of OpenClaw, local governments dangled grants to startups that build OpenClaw apps, and a cottage industry sprung up helping users install the open-source framework.
The OpenClaw craze also aligns with China’s embrace of open-source AI, a strategy that has helped build labs’ reputation among the developer community and slowly helped models work their way into global business.
Steinberger released OpenClaw on GitHub last November, where it quickly caught on among AI developers and hobbyists. OpenClaw is what is called “an agentic harness.” It isn’t an AI model itself—a user has to pick a model from an AI company to serve as the agent’s brain. But OpenClaw consists of a set of instructions for how an AI agent should deconstruct a goal into a series of subtasks, protocols that allow a user to connect various software tools for the AI agent to use, and also a memory function that means the AI agent won’t forget what it has done so far.
Those subsidies are landing in a market where users are eager to experiment with new AI. “Younger generations in Asia, and especially in China, are part of a high-tech adoption culture,” Jan Wuppermann, the head of service assurance, data and AI for NTT Data, said to Fortune. “There’s a mindset I often hear from everyday Chinese friends: It’s there anyway, I may as well use it.”
The OpenClaw craze has helped the stock market fortunes of some Chinese AI companies. Tencent’s stock is up by 8.9% over the past week. MiniMax is up by 27.4% since the weekend; shares are now up by more than 600% from its IPO earlier this year.
The answer? Expensive.
The AI startup reported total revenue of $79 million, an increase of 159%. Over 70% of this revenue came from overseas markets, showing that MiniMax is finding traction outside of China. Yet the company still posted a net loss of $1.8 billion, in part thanks to research and development costs totaling $252 million.
Still, investors don’t seem to care. At one point last week, MiniMax was worth more than tech giant Baidu, despite the latter generating $18.5 billion in 2025 revenue, more than 230 times more than MiniMax.
Using open-source also gives companies options, and doesn’t lock them into one particular provider—which may be useful for startups trying to navigate a constantly-changing world of regulations, export controls, and shifting alliances.
Still, open-source models shift the burden of running compute onto the user. “You can get narrowly excited about cost-per-token comparisons between a commercial model and an open-source model, but that’s only one part of the cost,” Walters cautions.
Companies need to pay for their own processors, but there are hidden costs too. Wuppermann notes that “hidden costs, like security breaches and complexity, often aren’t measured, and instead show up in other dimensions, like extra headcount or longer time-to-market”.
For Wuppermann, the decision to go open-source is mostly philosophical. “Those who have converted to open-source will always advocate open-source.”
Even as OpenClaw and Chinese open-source models gain momentum, China’s AI ecosystem faces rising scrutiny over data security, intellectual property and Beijing’s own shifting priorities.
Oddly enough, the complaints may have ended up reinforcing the reputation of Chinese labs. Reaction to Anthropic’s accusations on social media were mixed, with some users noting that even if DeepSeek and others were engaging in “illicit” distillation, they were at least sharing their work—unlike Anthropic, which has kept its AI models closed-source.
Still, Chinese companies keep on releasing their own versions of OpenClaw. On March 12, Sensetime, once one of China’s most prominent AI firms, announced that it had integrated its office assistant “Office Raccoon” with OpenClaw.
