A line of nearly a thousand people snaked outside Tencent's Shenzhen headquarters on March 6. They carried laptops and hard drives. They waited for hours while company engineers installed OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent that had gripped China's tech world for weeks, free of charge.
Five days later, Beijing told state-run banks, government agencies, and military families to uninstall it.
In between those two events, Tencent shipped WorkBuddy. Zhipu AI launched AutoClaw. Xiaomi released Miclaw. Baidu rolled out one-click cloud deployment. Moonshot pushed Kimi Claw. The ban and the domestic replacements arrived in the same news cycle, and that timing tells you more about Beijing's AI strategy than any white paper ever will.
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