OpenClaw is spreading through China’s technology ecosystem at a pace that has outrun the central government’s ability to regulate it. Major tech companies, local governments, and ordinary workers are racing to adopt the open-source AI agent despite official warnings about security risks, according to on-the-ground reporting from The Asahi Shimbun in Shanghai and Beijing.
Seminars, Subsidies, and 500-Person Crowds
A Shanghai seminar organized by an IT provider on March 13 drew approximately 500 attendees, nearly filling the venue, according to the Asahi Shimbun. Attendees included a food industry worker sent by her employer to find “a useful tool to render my work more efficient,” a twentysomething telecom worker exploring product R&D applications, and another who cited “serious relevant risks” and planned to “wait and see.”
The pattern extends well beyond Shanghai. According to Fortune, reporting from AP, around 50 people gathered outside the Beijing headquarters of a Chinese mobile internet company on a recent weekday, waiting for help installing OpenClaw on their laptops. Similar scenes repeated for days in Shenzhen in March, as engineers helped crowds set up the agent.
Local governments are now subsidizing adoption. Shenzhen’s Longgang district unveiled measures on March 7 covering IT companies that develop OpenClaw services and corporations that implement the agent in daily operations, with a dedicated program for single-member firms, the Asahi Shimbun reported. Similar policies have been announced by Wuxi and Changshu in Jiangsu province and Hefei in Anhui province.
The Infrastructure Race
Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu are launching competing services and seminars as if “in competition with each other,” the Asahi Shimbun reported. Their incentive is direct: cloud systems they sell are required to run AI agents, making OpenClaw adoption a growth driver for their infrastructure businesses.
Tencent has integrated OpenClaw into WeChat, according to the Los Angeles Times and Fortune. Alibaba is embedding agentic AI into its workflows. The competitive dynamic extends beyond the tech incumbents: companies across manufacturing and service industries are “spontaneously making concerted efforts” to deploy what the Asahi Shimbun described as “digitized employees” in accounting, finance, and product planning.
Regulatory Warnings, Limited Effect
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology called on users on March 11 to “pay the utmost attention to safety” when using OpenClaw, describing its “high degree of authority and autonomy” as “a double-edged sword.” The Ministry of State Security and other organizations issued similar warnings, according to the Asahi Shimbun. Bloomberg News reported, citing sources, that Chinese authorities notified government agencies and state-owned enterprises to restrict OpenClaw use.
The warnings have not noticeably slowed adoption. Li Fei, a senior researcher at Japan’s Mitsui & Co. Global Strategic Studies Institute, told the Asahi Shimbun that Chinese users have “a strong proactive mindset to aggressively take on challenges and move forward anyhow, even though it may mean risk management is put on hold.”
The broader numbers support that assessment. More than 600 million Chinese people were using generative AI as of December 2025, a 142% increase from a year earlier, according to a report from the government-controlled China Internet Network Information Center cited by Fortune. Chinese AI models recently surpassed U.S. models in weekly token share on OpenRouter, the AI gateway platform, according to the same Fortune report.
The Enterprise Calculus
Chinese companies are increasingly setting internal targets for AI-driven efficiency gains, according to Janet Tang, a partner and managing director at consultancy AlixPartners, quoted by Fortune. A Chinese college student in Macao told Fortune he used OpenClaw to automatically generate promotional videos and manage social media accounts during an internship at a real estate agency in Zhuhai, and built a company website in 10 minutes for less than 5 yuan (70 cents).
“The competition is clearly shifting from models to ecosystems,” Lizzi Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, told Fortune. “Chinese users are basically acting as real-time testers at scale.”
This article draws on original reporting by the Asahi Shimbun’s Nen Satomi (Shanghai) and Yuriko Suzuki (Beijing), and AP reporting via Fortune.