By Laurie Chen and Eduardo Baptista

BEIJING, March 19 (Reuters) - Fan Xinquan, a retired electronics worker in Beijing, has recently started raising a "lobster," hoping that the AI agent he has been training can help organise his specialised industry knowledge better than chatbots like DeepSeek.

"OpenClaw can actually help you accomplish many practical things," the 60-year-old said at a recent event hosted by AI startup Zhipu to teach people how to use and train the AI agent, which has gone viral in China, with its various local versions earning the "lobster" nickname.

In the past month, OpenClaw, which can connect several hardware and software tools and learn from the data produced with much less human intervention than a chatbot, has captured the imaginations of many in China, from retirees looking for side income to AI firms hoping to generate new revenue streams.

After first appearing in November, the tool has become one of the fastest-growing projects in the history of GitHub, the world's most widely adopted AI-powered developer platform.

The hype over the open-source, agent-controlling bot created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger is the latest example of how a new technology could overhaul the world's second-largest economy through unbridled consumer adoption.

"If DeepSeek marked a milestone for open-source large language models, then OpenClaw represents a similar turning point for open-source agents," said Wei Sun, chief AI analyst at Counterpoint Research.

Nvidia NVDA.O CEO Jensen Huang this week said OpenClaw is "the next ChatGPT" and growing enthusiasm over the technology sent Chinese tech shares up by as much as 22% in recent weeks as companies rolled out a suite of products based on the agent.

OPENCLAW DRAWS CHILDREN AND RETIREES

Huang Rongsheng, chief architect at Baidu's BIDU.O smart device unit Xiaodu, said at an event on Tuesday that parent group chats for his daughter's primary school class have become overwhelmed by OpenClaw discussions.

"My daughter came to me and asked: Dad, I see you raising a lobster every day," he said. "Can I have one too?"

Bai Yiyun, another attendee at the Zhipu event, said she hopes to use the agent to start a side hustle during her retirement.

"Some people use it to buy lottery tickets or for stock picking, others use it to create money-making apps or open e-commerce shops, but I don't know if it brings them any real profits," she said.

Aside from get-rich-quick schemes, many OpenClaw users hope for dramatic boosts in productivity, with some local governments offering subsidies of up to 20 million yuan ($2.8 million) a year for qualifying "one-person companies."

"(The OpenClaw frenzy) directly coincides with what the Chinese government wants when it comes to the AI Plus initiative," said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at tech research firm Omdia, referring to a national policy aimed at embedding AI across the economy.

SECURITY RISKS AND TECHNICAL CHALLENGES

But the initial wave of enthusiasm could still peter out, especially as token costs accumulate and regulators warn of security vulnerabilities. Zhipu this week raised token prices on its new OpenClaw-optimised AI model by 20%.

"Output is extremely low: ordinary people spend tens or hundreds of yuan, burning through a bunch of tokens and in the end, they might only get a pile of useless data," read one post on Rednote, a social media platform, titled "Goodbye OpenClaw."

"This is not 'embracing the future,' it's 'being harvested by the future,'" it said.

The widespread enthusiasm in Chinese society and industry has also spooked Beijing, with a growing number of Chinese institutions - including government agencies, brokerages and universities - banning employees from installing OpenClaw following regulatory warnings.

A commentary last week published by the state-owned People's Daily, which serves as a mouthpiece for China's ruling Communist Party, urged the government to "firmly maintain the safety bottom line to ensure that innovation does not deviate or derail" with OpenClaw.

"Beijing clearly sees AI as strategically important and wants Chinese firms to commercialize quickly," said Rui Ma, founder of the Tech Buzz China newsletter.

"But it also wants deployment to stay legible, secure and politically manageable ... the concern is utterly uncontrolled and chaotic diffusion that could cause harm."

Li Hongxue, a data security professional at a finance company, said the contrast between central government warnings and actions by local governments felt "contradictory."

"Its development is still unstoppable, but the security capabilities also need to keep up so in that sense, this may also be an opportunity for (my) field," she added.

Another issue is whether the agent can smoothly operate across apps and devices that are controlled by a wide range of companies, which are sometimes in competition with each other.

At the Baidu event on Tuesday, an employee used a voice command - sent through a Xiaodu smart device - to order coffee on a McDonald's MCD.N app, an operation made possible by an OpenClaw agent.

Almost two minutes passed before the order was ready for payment.

"As you can see, I only gave a simple command, but to complete the whole delivery there is actually a lot of work being done in the background by Xiaodu and the lobster," the Baidu employee said.

(Reporting by Laurie Chen and Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Miyoung Kim and Thomas Derpinghaus)

((Laurie.Chen@thomsonreuters.com;))