In the halls of Tencent, the lobster is king. So goes reporting from this area of the tech world, where the age of agentic AI is shown off in bold color.
Tencent, founded in 1998, is a top Chinese tech firm best known for its WeChat and QQ messaging platforms. It dominates gaming globally, owns stakes in major tech companies, and provides cloud, fintech, and AI services. Tencent operates as a vast digital ecosystem, integrating communication, entertainment, payments, and enterprise tools across billions of users worldwide.
So what's happening there? Apparently, Tencent employees are rushing to install OpenClaw on their devices and letting it play with their systems.
For those who don't know, OpenClaw is an open-source AI personal assistant with agentic capabilities. That means instead of just passively responding to user events, the technology uses neural net cognition to "actually do things," working proactively on what it "thinks" is the human user's best interests.
Now, there's been a lot of controversy as this crustacean-themed digital paradigm has been rolling out. On the one hand, OpenClaw can be great for productivity. On the other hand, it can be a security nightmare. It can delete files at will, jeopardize systems, or itself become vulnerable to a new version of a spearphishing hack. So companies have banned it, and experts have suggested that users should be embracing it with caution.
The Mad Rush
At Tencent, though, it seems to be a damn-the-torpedoes approach, according to reporting from The Information and elsewhere.
Lee Chong Ming, writing for Business Insider, reports going to a Tencent event and seeing scores of people download and install OpenClaw in a process the Chinese apparently call "raising the lobster." I'm pretty close to the MIT community, and I don't see anything like that going on here.
"The room filled fast, with people locked in during demos," Chong Ming reports. "I cringed as dozens of people at the front pinched their fingers into makeshift pincers."
The rest of the story is pretty interesting, too. Here are three big things I take away from this instance of a Chinese company getting serious about a new AI application with, well, legs and claws.
China is Ahead
As I've been reporting on the cutting edge of robotics, I've noticed a clear trend: the Chinese are much further ahead. Robots are running marathons in Beijing, walking down the street and waving to people. Again, we don't see things like that here, although I did recently announce the use of humanoid robot participants in an upcoming race here in Boston.
Anyway, it makes sense that if there's a room full of people "raising the lobster," that room is going to be in the middle kingdom, and not, say middle America, where most people have never shook hands with a humanoid robot, or spoken to one, and would, no doubt, be abundantly creeped out.
Peer Pressure Plays a Role
In his report, Chong Ming talks to a young career pro named Sylvia Han.
"People sometimes are just: FOMO," Han said. "So, like in China, in Shenzhen, some old people, they don't know how to use the AI themselves. They just go to Tencent to see what happens."
That's one person's testimony from the event, but check out what Chong Ming himself writes about his feeling while watching this group event.
"I had decided not to install OpenClaw during the event as I wasn't comfortable with the idea of letting it run freely on my personal devices," he wrote, "But, sitting through the demos, I started to second-guess that decision. Around me, people were locked in. Some had their phones raised; others were tapping away on their laptops."
So it only took sitting in a room full of enthusiasts to "second-guess" that prudent decision that he made based on informed caution.
That's what I mean: when this technology does really come to our shores, I think quite a few people will end up getting on board, maybe in waves. FOMO.
Not the Brain
Another key thing to think about is that OpenClaw is not Tencent's model. In some ways, it's not anybody's model. But it's not functioning as "the brain" of Tencent networks. Instead, it's a tool. It's assistive AI that will help human users to boost their own productivity. That's a departure from the early days where people logged in to use an early GPT or Claude.
Think of that prior era as the "mainframe" era of LLMs: they were centrally housed in large facilities. Now agentic AI is everywhere.
Think about that. Stay tuned.