The grassroots enthusiasm that made OpenClaw China’s hottest tech trend is producing an equally rapid grassroots retreat. NBC News reported today that users who spent days configuring and training their OpenClaw agents are uninstalling the software within a week, citing security risks they didn’t fully understand when they started.
The piece profiles two users whose experiences track the arc NCT has been covering since March 16. Sky Lei, a Beijing-based creator, uninstalled after three days. “At this stage, I think the risks and the gains are not proportional at all,” he told NBC News. Hu Qiyun, a 24-year-old software engineer in Shanghai, uninstalled too, though he later reinstalled after seeing the pace of updates.
The Uninstallation Economy
The most telling detail in the NBC report: paid uninstallation services have appeared on Chinese social media platforms alongside the paid installation services that fueled the original adoption wave. The same ecosystem that helped non-technical users set up OpenClaw is now helping them remove it.
This tracks with what NCT reported earlier today about China’s official security guidance, which told ordinary consumers to run OpenClaw on dedicated devices or virtual machines rather than personal computers. For the millions of Chinese users who installed OpenClaw directly on their everyday laptops, that guidance arrived after the fact.
23,000 Users Exposed
NBC News cites China’s National Cybersecurity Alert Center (CNCERT) reporting that the assets of nearly 23,000 OpenClaw users across the country had been exposed to the internet. CNCERT warned these users are “highly likely to become priority targets for cyberattack.”
The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), part of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, told NBC it is developing formal standards for “claw” agents covering “manageable user permissions, transparency in execution processes, controllable behavioral risks, and trustworthy platform and tool capabilities.”
That standards development process is running in parallel with continued government support for OpenClaw adoption. Shenzhen is still offering grants of up to 5 million yuan ($700,000) for solo-founder startups building OpenClaw applications. Tencent launched WeChat integration on Sunday. Alibaba, Baidu, and ByteDance have all shipped OpenClaw-based products in the past week.
Emotional Attachment and Agent Naming
Lei’s account of uninstalling includes a detail that captures something the security guidance doesn’t address. OpenClaw asks users to name their agent during setup and maintains persistent memory across conversations. Lei told NBC he was “reluctant to kill it with my own hands, which shows how risky it felt to me, so I had to uninstall it quickly.”
Lei’s reluctance to “kill” a piece of software underscores the tension between OpenClaw’s design, which encourages users to personalize and name their agents, and the security posture required to use it safely.
The Adoption Numbers in Context
OpenClaw usage in China is now almost double that in the United States, according to cybersecurity firm SecurityScorecard. More than 600 million people in China use generative AI, per a Chinese government report cited by NBC, providing the user base that made the “lobster frenzy” possible.
The speed of the backlash matches the speed of adoption. From Tencent headquarters installation lines to paid uninstallation services in roughly two weeks. Chinese authorities, tech companies, and individual users are all moving fast in different directions simultaneously, with no regulatory framework in place to reconcile the contradictions.