OpenClaw has rapidly emerged in China as an artificial intelligence trading tool, jolting the market.

On March 13, local time, blockchain outlet BeInCrypto reported that OpenClaw has drawn attention in China’s AI market after securing 260,000 GitHub stars in four months. It remains unclear whether AI-based trading can guarantee stable returns.

OpenClaw had been in the spotlight as a productivity tool, but Chinese developers have begun using it as an investment tool. More than 300 finance and investment-related skills are listed on its official marketplace, ClawHub, and some cases have been reported in which $50, about 74,000 won, was turned into $2,980, about 4,435,000 won, in just 48 hours.

But for most users, AI trading is not delivering profits as expected. A developer on Cnblogs said after a two-week experiment, "OpenClaw is only an analysis tool, and it has major limitations as an execution tool."

Security issues are also serious. A supply-chain attack dubbed 'ClawHavoc' that occurred in late 2025 infected 1,184 malicious skills, and many of them were found to be aimed at stealing cryptocurrency. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology urged stronger security for AI trading tools. It later recommended checking permissions and blocking unnecessary access to public networks, and issued guidelines restricting the use of unverified plugins and the installation of third-party mirrors.

AI trading experiments existed even before OpenClaw. In 'Alpha Arena' hosted by U.S. research firm Nof1 in 2025, six AI models competed in the cryptocurrency market, but four recorded losses, showing the limitations of AI-based trading. OpenClaw has clearly lowered the hurdle for retail investors to build AI trading systems, but an assessment has emerged that security and execution problems remain unresolved.

Alibaba’s secondhand trading platform Xianyu has reportedly seen the emergence since mid-March of services that offer to delete OpenClaw on users’ behalf. Some Chinese universities have banned the use of OpenClaw on campus networks, and wariness over security risks is spreading.