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The extent of AI excitement among China’s public may be overstated, analysts argued. A viral craze this year saw grandmothers installing the agentic AI tool OpenClaw, part of the so-called “raising lobsters” frenzy that was widely presented as evidence of rabid AI enthusiasm in China. But the lobster has become a “relic of the past,” a Chinese tech outlet wrote, largely because of the high barrier to entry for the software and steep token costs that accompanied it; the US now has more OpenClaw instances deployed than China. Still, optimism toward AI in general is higher in China, Bloomberg wrote last month, in part because for many in the country, “technology has repeatedly broadened opportunity.”
document fetched 2026-09-02 06:32 · canonical https://semafor.com/article/09/01/2026/openclaw-hype-dies-down-in-china