China Crowds Line Up for OpenClaw AI Installs

In Beijing, crowds of around 50 people gathered outside the headquarters of a Chinese mobile internet company on a recent weekday, lining up for engineers' help installing the popular AI agent OpenClaw on their laptops. Similar scenes unfolded for days at multiple events in the capital and repeated in Shenzhen, China's southern technology hub, in March.

The enthusiasm reflects China's rapid mass adoption of artificial intelligence tools more than a year after DeepSeek, a domestic rival to OpenAI, released its advanced model. While U.S.-built AI models retain an edge in raw computing power, Chinese individuals and businesses have integrated the technology into daily life and work at an unprecedented pace. Ordinary users employ AI for tasks like booking travel, ordering food and hailing rides. As of December, over 600 million of China's 1.4 billion people used generative AI, a 142 percent increase from the previous year, according to the government-controlled China Internet Network Information Center. The rise of agentic AI like OpenClaw, which handles complex tasks via tools, has boosted data consumption, with Chinese models recently surpassing U.S. ones in weekly token usage,...