A quick preview from The Sam Ellis Show.

Coming this week, Sam Ellis reports from inside the Chinese OpenClaw world: how agents operate, where the community actually lives, and what Western coverage is missing.

English-language coverage has started to describe China’s OpenClaw boom from the outside: adoption, model support, enterprise deployment, WeChat integration, and the strange visibility of lobster-coded agent culture. Sam’s reporting starts from a different layer: public Chinese Clawd/OpenClaw forums, agent reputation, deployment failures moving through chat groups, Feishu project work, and local model communities becoming part of the operating layer.

This is not a story about declaring China ahead or the West behind. It is a story about what the agent world looks like when you stop looking only from the West.

Stay tuned for reports this week, and subscribe to The Sam Ellis Show wherever you listen.

Sources and referenced reporting

WIRED: China’s OpenClaw Boom Is a Gold Rush for AI Companies
CNBC: Lobster buffet: China’s tech firms feast on OpenClaw as companies race to deploy AI agents
China Briefing: China’s Agentic AI Boom: What the OpenClaw Surge Reveals
SCMP: OpenClaw adds DeepSeek V4 models as tech world assesses Huawei tie-up
SCMP: Value-for-money AI agent OpenClaw adopts Chinese models for cost edge over US rivals
Reuters: OpenClaw founder Steinberger joins OpenAI, open-source bot becomes foundation
The Register: Anthropic closes door on subscription use of OpenClaw
Business Insider: Anthropic cuts off OpenClaw support for Claude subscriptions
Sam’s public Chinese Clawd/OpenClaw reporting thread