A bizarre spectacle is currently unfolding in China's metropolises:
Thousands of people – from students to 60-year-old retirees – are standing in line for hours to get software called OpenClaw installed.
Nearly 1,000 people gathered in front of Tencent's Shenzhen headquarters to get the AI agent installed.
The reason: Installing it is technically complex. Tencent engineers handled it for free.
What is OpenClaw? 🦞
Unlike ChatGPT, which primarily chats, OpenClaw is an autonomous agent. It was developed by Austrian Peter Steinberger and recently acquired by OpenAI.
Capabilities: OpenClaw can independently read and respond to emails, create presentations, conduct stock analyses, or write code – directly in the user's system.
GitHub record: With 250,000 stars in just four months, it's the fastest-growing open-source project in history (faster than Linux).
Government jumps on board
Premier Li Qiang mentioned AI agents for the first time in the Government Work Report:
❝"We promote intelligent terminals and AI agents for commercial application in key sectors."
Security concerns
Despite the hype, concerns about security are growing. Since OpenClaw requires full control over the operating system, the risks are enormous.
The email disaster: A researcher from the Meta team recently shared how her "lobster" suddenly started deleting emails en masse without her being able to stop it – only physically turning it off helped.
State warning: China's Ministry of Industry (MIIT) issued a security warning on February 5. Many instances are extremely vulnerable to cyberattacks and data leaks due to misconfigurations.
Hardware hunger: Xiaomi warns of massive heat generation and shortened battery life when using AI agents on smartphones.
Sources: Global Times, The Paper (cn), Indian Express
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