Chinese tech giants offer cheap, easy access to OpenClaw amid ‘lobster fever’

Chinese technology firms, including internet giants Tencent Holdings, Alibaba Group Holding and ByteDance, are offering easy or inexpensive access to OpenClaw, the popular open-source AI agent software amid a “lobster fever” in the country.Tencent on Tuesday officially launched QClaw, an artificial intelligence assistant built on OpenClaw that can connect to the company’s super app WeChat. After download and installation on a computer that takes about three minutes, users can remotely control their laptop by sending a command via WeChat on the phone, according to its website.Shares of Hong Kong-listed AI companies MiniMax and Zhipu AI surged 22 per cent and 13 per cent, respectively, on Tuesday, as they took steps to incorporate OpenClaw tools. MiniMax integrated its voice and music generators with the OpenClaw ecosystem, while Zhipu released AutoClaw, which can deploy a local version of OpenClaw within one minute.Alibaba on Monday released a comprehensive guide for integrating OpenClaw with DingTalk, its enterprise communication platform. DingTalk is offering unlimited API calls, or interactions, with OpenClaw until March 31.Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud, the company’s cloud unit, has launched tutorials and resources that allow developers to deploy OpenClaw for as low as 9.9 yuan (US$1.4). Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.TikTok owner ByteDance’s cloud unit Volcano Engine on Monday unveiled ArkClaw, marketing it as an “out-of-the-box” version of OpenClaw that runs entirely in the cloud, eliminating the need for complex local environment configuration.Last Friday, nearly 1,000 people lined up outside Tencent’s Shenzhen headquarters to install OpenClaw on their computers. Photo: Handout