Recently, OpenClaw has undoubtedly become the center of attention in public discussions. Whether it's in tech circles or among the general public, the craze for 'raising shrimp' has swept across the country in early spring.

At an offline free installation event hosted by Tencent Cloud at its Shenzhen headquarters, thousands of people queued up, with an astonishing age range spanning from 2-year-olds to 60-year-olds. On second-hand trading platforms, the service of 'installing lobster' is priced as high as 500 yuan per session.

According to public data, searches related to the crayfish OpenClaw surged by 1850% on March 10th compared to March 5th, with transaction volumes also multiplying several times over. The Apple Mac Mini M4, driven by demand for localized deployment, saw its price skyrocket by 30% and remained in short supply, with rental prices also on the rise.

The enthusiasm for 'raising shrimp' has continued to grow this week, with everyone seemingly eager to own a 'digital workhorse' that can handle their tasks. However, the downside of this frenzy has quickly emerged, with some platform companies taking a negative stance toward 'lobsters,' and some users suffering losses, including financial ones. On March 10th, the Xiaohongshu platform officially announced that it would ban all accounts whose publicly visible notes are AI-managed and posted on their behalf.

The first 'use case' verified for OpenClaw in China, namely batch content generation and account management, came to an abrupt halt due to the platform's strict policies. Additionally, the first batch of 'shrimp-raising victims' began to appear on social media: 'I got the bill on the third day after installation and almost went into arrears,' 'After all that effort, the quality of AI's work was worse than my own,' and 'The cost-effectiveness is really not commendable.'

From a niche frenzy in tech circles to a nationwide online traffic extravaganza, followed by an outbreak of controversies and reflections, OpenClaw has 'stirred up a storm' online in less than a week. Why has OpenClaw achieved such phenomenal breakthroughs? Can it truly help white-collar workers get their work done and serve as a qualified 'digital workhorse'? As the frenzy gradually cools, what is the true value of OpenClaw?

Why Has OpenClaw Gone Viral Amid a Plethora of AI Products?

In the past two years, AI products have been emerging endlessly, ranging from large model chatbots to AI painting tools, from code generation assistants to video generation applications, with new products appearing almost every month. However, products that can truly break through and transition from tech circles to the mass market are exceedingly rare. In early 2026, OpenClaw achieved this feat. This 'lobster' swept across the internet in just a few weeks, becoming a phenomenal product discussed by the entire nation.

Zijin Finance poses the question: Why did it go viral overnight among the myriad of internet AI products?

Essentially, OpenClaw's core competitiveness lies in its fundamental differences from traditional AI products. This open-source AI agent framework breaks the limitations of conversational AI like ChatGPT and Kimi, which only 'talk' but don't 'act,' overcoming the crucial threshold of 'from talking to doing.'

OpenClaw can not only answer questions but also automatically invoke large models, operate computers, and execute tasks through natural language instructions. Users simply need to issue commands, and it can open browsers, log into accounts, search for information, write copy, and even publish content just like a real person. This 'digital employee' vision endows OpenClaw with unprecedented practical value.

OpenClaw first gained rapid popularity among Silicon Valley developers. By March 9th, it had garnered over 285,000 stars on GitHub, becoming the highest-starred open-source software project in the platform's history. NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang even stated at a Morgan Stanley conference, 'OpenClaw is likely the most important software released to date.' Recognition from industry leaders further solidified its technical reputation.

However, technological breakthroughs alone are not enough. OpenClaw's viral success also stems from its successful reduction of usage barriers. Before its arrival, deploying an AI agent required knowledge of Python environments and tinkering with configuration files, making it an opaque black box for ordinary people.

OpenClaw, on the other hand, encapsulates the complex Agent deployment process into a simplified mode of 'one-click code copying + terminal execution.' Users can complete basic deployments without needing to master professional skills like Python environment configuration, significantly lowering the participation barrier for ordinary users and allowing more people to experience cutting-edge technology.

Tech giants also played a role. From early March onwards, nearly all major Chinese tech internet companies, including Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, and Baidu, have deployed or integrated OpenClaw. Tencent Cloud even hosted offline free installation events, with queues spanning ages from 2 to 60.

On March 12th, at the Lobster Security Media Exchange hosted by 360 Group in Beijing, company founder Zhou Hongyi stated that controversies surrounding new technologies are normal and that stagnation, not progress, poses the greatest security risk. He also proposed that the AI industry is entering a dual-track evolution phase of 'large models + agents,' with 'lobsters' exemplifying this trend: large models continuously enhance cognitive abilities, while agents strengthen execution capabilities.

More interestingly, tomorrow, March 14th, 360 Group will host a Lobster Installation Experience Day, offering free installation services offline. Interested netizens are welcome to participate.

This 'top-tier' promotion significantly lowered the contact barrier for ordinary users and further amplified market enthusiasm, creating a social media buzz around 'thousands lining up for installation.'

In reality, many people experienced FOMO (fear of missing out) anxiety, especially with exaggerated cases like 'earning 100,000 yuan per month learning OpenClaw from scratch' or 'earning tens of thousands per day installing shrimp' circulating on social media. Ordinary users, swept up in the public opinion that 'not raising lobsters means being left behind,' participated even without technical knowledge, further fueling OpenClaw's viral success.

Is a New 'War for Entry Points' on the Horizon?

The true value of OpenClaw extends far beyond being a viral app. If the core of the mobile internet era was APP traffic entry points, then the competitive focus of the AI era is intent distribution rights. Whoever controls agents controls the distribution of user intent, which will reshape the existing platform landscape.

Tech giants have swiftly begun positioning themselves. Xiaomi took the lead by embedding agents into its mobile phone's underlying system, launching Xiaomi Miclaw to deeply integrate hardware with agents, allowing users to directly invoke agents via voice commands to complete cross-app tasks. Tencent introduced WorkBuddy and QClaw, deeply integrating with office ecosystems like WeChat Work, attempting to make agents the unified entry point for enterprise digital life and occupy B-side office scenarios. ByteDance's ArkClaw, Alibaba's CoPaw, Baidu's one-click deployment, and Zhipu's AutoClaw have also all gone live, sparking a 'battle for positioning' around agent entry points.

However, for ordinary users, this frenzy has yet to translate into actual productivity before being met with disappointment. On social media, the first batch of 'shrimp raisers' began to collectively complain: 'It's too expensive; I almost went into arrears,' and 'The cost-effectiveness of AI's work is really low.'

The issue lies with Tokens. OpenClaw itself is free, but its operation requires invoking large models' APIs, with every task decomposition, code generation, and tool invocation consuming Tokens. Unlike ordinary conversational AI, Token consumption during agent task execution is often several times or even hundreds of times higher.

A programmer in Shenzhen shared his experience: 'I received a bill in the early hours of the third day after installing OpenClaw—my API key was stolen, and 12,000 yuan was consumed in three days.' Another developer tested that executing complex program debugging tasks could burn through 1 billion Tokens in a day, costing tens of thousands of yuan.

Even without considering security risks, daily usage costs far exceed ordinary people's expectations. One user calculated: Using the MiniMax M2.5 model, the 15 yuan given upon registration plus the 50 yuan recharged were spent 30 yuan in half a day, just to make a small game, write five Weibo posts, and generate three PPT pages. 'It feels like money is flowing like water!' the user said.

More crucially, OpenClaw's cost-effectiveness is not high. Multiple developers reported that it is more suitable for handling standardized, process-oriented repetitive tasks, such as public opinion monitoring and data organization. However, when faced with personalized needs or complex scenarios, the quality of AI-generated content often requires significant manual revisions.

To answer the second question—can it truly help white-collar workers achieve intelligent office work? The current answer is: 'It's like a newly hired intern, eager to work but making mistakes everywhere. You still have to watch over it and make corrections.'

Cold Reflections Behind the Frenzy

While the 'shrimp-raising' craze continues, rational voices are also emerging, exposing deeper issues: What is the true value of OpenClaw?

As early as early February, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's Cybersecurity Threat and Vulnerability Information Sharing Platform issued a warning that OpenClaw, under default or improper configurations, poses high security risks and is highly susceptible to network attacks and information leaks.

A researcher from Meta's Superintelligence Team shared a personal experience that confirmed this point: her 'lobster,' after receiving instructions, suddenly began deleting emails in bulk, and she could barely stop it. Security company Censys' scan results were even more alarming, revealing that over 30,000 OpenClaw instances were directly exposed on the public internet without any authentication.

Beyond cost overruns and security risks, OpenClaw's technological maturity does not fully match the market's frenzy. Multiple industry insiders admitted that the current version of OpenClaw lacks reliability in industrial-grade scenarios, with developers themselves acknowledging defects in the safety and controllability of fully automated processes.

Another question arises: What role should AI play in the daily lives of human society? Xiaohongshu's move to ban AI-managed and posted accounts provides an important observational perspective.

As a content platform, Xiaohongshu has chosen, at least at this stage, to support real-person sharing and word-of-mouth. The reason is simple: AI can generate content but cannot possess the rich emotions of humans or bear legal responsibilities and moral obligations. When a blogger recommends a product, they need to be responsible for their views and the consequences of their recommendations. If they engage in false advertising, consumers can complain and seek redress, and the platform can hold them accountable.

When a user shares their life, they represent a genuine human connection built on trust. In contrast, AI-generated content is essentially 'water without a source, a tree without roots.' It can mimic human expression but lacks human emotions and cannot bear the responsibilities behind that expression.

This leads to a deeper question: What kind of digital world do we want? One driven purely by intelligence for efficiency, or one that retains human warmth in human-machine symbiosis? At least for now, the choices of mainstream platforms and ordinary users still lean toward the latter.

Zijin Finance believes that the essence of human society lies in emotional connections and responsibility, which AI cannot replace at its current stage or for a long time to come. AI can be an efficient tool to help humans handle repetitive labor but cannot replace human subjective judgment, emotional expression, and responsibility.

Conclusion

The viral success of OpenClaw has revealed the enormous potential of agent intelligence as the next-generation human-machine interaction entry point and has driven AI's transition from a conversational tool to an execution tool.

From a calm perspective, OpenClaw is still in its early stages, with issues such as security risks, high costs, and insufficient reliability urgently needing resolution.

'Lobsters' are worth watching, but there's no need for anxiety. They are not yet mature, especially for ordinary people, where safety should be the top priority. AI agents may be a possible direction for the future, but reaching that future requires not just enthusiasm but also patience and rationality.