China’s OpenClaw Frenzy Tests Xi’s Approach to Regulate AI
The OpenClaw craze spreading across China is testing Beijing’s approach to artificial intelligence; because Beijing is trying to balance a push for cutting-edge innovation against data security concerns.
Tech giants and consumers have moved to embrace AI over the past few weeks, and at its peak hundreds of people lined up outside a tech store in Shenzhen to help install the software.
But the uncontrolled seizure of foreign technology has caught the attention of authorities, and on Wednesday the central government warned state-run enterprises and institutions against installing the technology in office computers, according to people familiar with the matter.
China is racing to establish itself as a world leader in artificial intelligence and is seeking to embed AI across its economy to transform daily life as well as industries. The new directive underlines how this ambition conflicts with the ruling Communist Party’s instinct for stability and control.
“Chinese regulators often respond to threats from new technologies with extraordinary speed, but the adoption rate of OpenClaw and other intermediary tools still outpaces them,” said Kendra Schaefer, technology policy research partner and director of Trivium China.
Software like OpenClaw, an open-source autonomous artificial intelligence agent developed by an Austrian that came into general use this year, can perform many tasks from email cleaning to calendar management to flight check-ins. The practice of building an AI agent has even earned a nickname in China: “raising lobsters.”
Tencent, Alibaba, MiniMax and Baidu have released OpenClaw compatible tools. Local governments in cities such as Shenzhen, Wuxi and Hefei have announced large subsidies for startups built on the platform. But it requires unusually broad access to private data and can communicate externally, potentially exposing computers to external attacks.
Chery Automobile Co., one of China’s largest electric vehicle manufacturers. Ltd’s president, Yin Tongyue, said that during the frenzy, he asked his employees not to use the software until there was a training program. “I said everyone should postpone the installation for now and we can have a focused training program. We have to be willing to embrace new things, but not blindly follow the crowd… that can lead to some risks beyond our imagination,” he told Bloomberg News.
Beijing has previously raised alarm over foreign actors targeting datasets including geographic and genetic information, and the speed of OpenClaw’s adoption increases the urgency of regulatory intervention.
The Chinese government, unlike the European Union, has shied away from a comprehensive AI law. Instead, since 2022, it has been implementing temporary measures to address specific issues, such as algorithm recommendations and rules around deepfake content. Last year, it became the first government to mandate labels for AI-generated content.
“Beijing’s biggest challenge in regulating AI is the same challenge all governments face: technology is advancing so quickly that a regulation could be outdated before the ink dries,” said Matt Sheehan, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
So far, there is no regulation specifically targeting this latest software and addressing questions such as who is responsible for the actions of artificial intelligence agents. On Wednesday, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a research institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said it plans to test the reliability of artificial intelligence agents such as OpenClaw starting in late March and will develop a set of standards for their use.
“I definitely worry about security,” said Ryan Xie, a Chinese teacher in the southern city of Jiangmen who uses the AI agent to help with repetitive tasks such as preparing presentation slides and filling out forms. “So I’m looking for workarounds, like running Openclaw inside a Docker container and Sandbox, or configuring certain rules to prevent it from exceeding its limits.”
In a sign of the technology sector’s growing importance to the economy, Beijing has set a target of increasing the added value of key digital economy industries to 12.5% of gross domestic product by 2030, from 10.5% last year.
This is where artificial intelligence and “lobster fever” present another challenge: social stability. Automation threatens to displace the world’s largest workforce in a country already grappling with a fragile labor market and youth unemployment that has hovered above 15% in the past six months.
Lu Jianhua, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a professor at Tsinghua University, said he is using artificial intelligence to study low-altitude economic infrastructure, a task that once required a small team of researchers.
“AI serves as a very capable assistant – equivalent to several human assistants,” said Lu, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
A recent study by Peking University of more than one million job postings found that industries most exposed to AI, including accounting, regulatory and programming, are already seeing hiring declines. In January, the Ministry of Human Resources announced that it was preparing a draft policy guide to address the impact of artificial intelligence on employment, but did not give a date for its publication.
Victor Chen, a fintech worker in Guangzhou who has been using OpenClaw since early February to help with projects ranging from mobile game development to novel writing, also worries about job loss.
“The more important underlying factor is that the government – as elsewhere in the world – is not actually prepared to deal with AI-induced mass unemployment and the social unrest it may cause,” he said.
With help from Jing Li, Colum Murphy and Tian Ying.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to the text.
