China's OpenClaw Craze: Paid Install Services, Mass Corporate Deployments, and a Hackathon

China’s OpenClaw craze continues to generate waves. TechInAsia reports that the rush has drawn hobbyists and students alike, spawning paid installation services on social media and meet-ups across Beijing, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou.

Corporate mass installs remain a notable feature of the boom. Engineers installed OpenClaw for users at Baidu’s Beijing headquarters on March 11, 2026. The most striking single data point: Tencent’s Shenzhen headquarters drew nearly 1,000 people on March 6 during a corporate install event.

On the community side, the Attrax Physical AI OpenClaw Hackathon ran in Shenzhen’s Longgang district — combining the AI agent framework with physical robotics and hardware. Shenzhen’s Longgang district also formalized its OpenClaw policy around the same time, suggesting local government engagement with the technology.

The broader OpenClaw ecosystem also got a boost from the April 2026 security crisis (which exposed 135,000+ instances), as Chinese CERT warnings and heightened enterprise scrutiny followed. Yet demand has remained strong, with the project sitting at over 347K GitHub stars as of early May 2026.

The pattern is consistent with other accounts of China’s AI agent boom — rapid grassroots adoption, corporate rollouts, and an active hacker community building on the open-source framework.