Before figuring out what is going on in the West, let’s look at the competition. Do independent Chinese competitors of OpenClaw exist?
Yes, several independent Chinese competitors and alternatives to the AI agent framework OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot/Moltbot) exist, focusing on autonomous, visual-based, and cost-effective AI assistants.
Key Chinese Competitors and Alternatives:
Zhipu AI (AutoGLM): Considered the closest competitor in China, AutoGLM focuses on "cross-application execution" by simulating human operations on mobile devices using visual recognition, bypassing the need for app APIs.
Moonshot AI (Kimi K2.5/Kimi Coding): Known for highly cost-effective, high-performance models, Kimi is heavily used within agentic frameworks in China, offering a significant cost advantage over US-based models.
Tencent (HunyuanWorld) & Alibaba (Qwen3.5): These tech giants are rapidly updating their models to support advanced agent behavior, challenging both OpenAI and the open-source OpenClaw ecosystem.
Nanobot (HKU): An independent, lightweight option arising from Hong Kong University, designed for high-performance with low-resource usage (e.g., running on a Raspberry Pi).
memU: Focuses on long-term memory and building a knowledge graph of user habits, serving as a specialized alternative for personal assistant use cases.
Contextual Factors:
Adoption in China: Despite security concerns, OpenClaw itself gained massive traction in China, with companies like Baidu integrating it into their search apps, and users running it on local hardware.
Open-Source Shift: The market is witnessing a surge in Chinese open-source models (e.g., Kimi, GLM-4.5, Qwen3) that are highly cost-competitive, with many of the top Hugging Face models now coming from China.
OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent, but running it typically costs $6 to $200+ per month due to LLM API usage and server hosting fees. While the software is free, costs depend on API (e.g., Claude, OpenAI) and infrastructure. Chinese models like Moonshot AI's Kimi and MiniMax are integrated as cheaper, high-performance alternatives, often 1/8th the cost of US competitors.
OpenClaw Cost Breakdown (2026)
Software Cost: Free (Open Source).
Operating Costs: Typically $6–$200+/month for API tokens and cloud hosting (e.g., VPS, Cloudflare).
Usage-Based Costs: High activity (active agent) can lead to significant API charges.
Alternative Hosting: Some use local, high-performance PCs for $0 hosting fees.
Chinese Competitors & Cost Comparison
OpenClaw has integrated Chinese AI models to reduce costs, making them direct, low-cost alternatives for powering the agent:
Moonshot AI (Kimi K2.5): Costs roughly $0.58 per million input tokens and $3 per output tokens.
MiniMax: Another Chinese provider integrated into OpenClaw for cost-effective performance.
Comparison: These Chinese models are roughly 1/9th to 1/8th the price of premium US models like Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5, which charges $5 per million input and $25 for output tokens.
Top Alternatives to OpenClaw
If looking for similar, potentially lower-cost or different deployment options:
Jan.ai: Best for privacy-focused local chat, open source.
AnythingLLM: Best for private knowledge bases.
Retool: Best for building internal AI tools.
Cloudflare Workers: Used for hosting agents at ~$5/month.
Let us explore more Zhipu AI's AutoGLM, that is a vision-language-action model designed to operate smartphones by interpreting on-screen pixels and simulating human gestures like taps, swipes, and text input.
Example Use Case: Automated Food Delivery
A primary use case is ordering food via voice command without manual app navigation.
The Process: You provide a prompt such as, "Order a cold coconut latte from the nearest coffee shop with half sugar".
Execution: AutoGLM identifies the correct app (e.g., Meituan), bypasses advertisements, selects the specific items and customizations, applies available discount coupons, and brings you directly to the final payment screen for confirmation.
Other use cases include:
Travel Planning: Booking flights and comparing prices across different airline apps and travel aggregators based on a budget.
E-commerce: Checking the shipping status of recent orders on platforms like Taobao.
Social Media: Automatically muting specific topics in a feed or generating and publishing content to platforms like TikTok or Xiaohongshu.
Cost of Use
As of early 2025, Zhipu AI has adopted an aggressive "free-to-use" strategy for individual users to compete with subscription-based models.
Individual Users: AutoGLM Rumination is available free of charge through the official Zhipu AI mobile app and website.
Developers: While the model itself is open-source (available on platforms like Hugging Face), accessing it via API for large-scale integration involves costs.
GLM-4.5 Air: Approximately $0.20 per 1 million input tokens and $1.10 per 1 million output tokens.
Flash Versions: Some versions, like GLM-4.7-Flash, are offered for free on the developer platform.
Zhipu AI's GLM-4.7-Flash looks interesting. What can you do with it? How much does it cost from start to finish?
Zhipu AI’s GLM-4.7-Flash is a high-performance 30B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model available for free on their developer platform, specifically optimized for coding, agentic workflows, and fast text generation with a 200K token context window
. It is designed for developers, offering free API usage (1 stream/concurrency) and, in some cases, $5 of monthly free credits, making it free for testing and development.
What You Can Do With GLM-4.7-Flash
Coding Assistance: It excels at coding tasks, competitive programming, and debugging, offering state-of-the-art open-source performance.
Agentic Workflows: Designed for AI agents, it supports complex tool calling, terminal-based automation, and step-by-step reasoning.
Long-Context Tasks: With a 200K context window (via MLA) (roughly equivalent to 500 pages of information), it can process large documentation or codebase analysis.
Creative & General Tasks: Ideal for fast, creative writing, translation, and roleplay scenarios.
Local Deployment: The model is available as open weights, allowing for local execution on NVIDIA, AMD, or Apple Silicon hardware.
Cost from Start to Finish
Development Phase: Free. Z.ai offers the GLM-4.7-Flash model for free on their platform, with 1 concurrent stream, and gives new users $5 of free credits every 30 days.
Production Phase: Extremely low cost. Compared to Claude/GPT, it is significantly cheaper, often described as a "free-tier" or highly economical option, with some API inputs being free.
Usage Limitations: The free tier is typically limited to one concurrent stream.
For developers, it acts as a "Haiku-equivalent" model, providing high-speed, cost-effective, and powerful AI capabilities for building applications.
People are trying to compete in America too:
“OpenAI's move to hire the creator of OpenClaw, the viral maker of personal AI assistants, is a testament to the ferocious competition that still exists for bold and unexpected ideas in artificial intelligence and the people who come up with them.
Peter Steinberger, an Austrian coder and entrepreneur who hacked together OpenClaw as a side project in November, is set to join OpenAI. His creation will be managed through a separate foundation.
Representatives for Meta Platforms and xAI also held talks with Steinberger during a whirlwind week that he spent in San Francisco earlier in February, people familiar with the matter said.
OpenClaw agents work as virtual personal assistants that can do tasks in the real world. Users communicate with agents through common messaging apps including WhatsApp, Telegram and iMessage. The agents then perform tasks such as sending emails and debugging code and even calling restaurants to make reservations.
Some technologists have suggested that OpenClaw could evolve into a kind of operating system allowing people to program their own personal assistants as more users turn to AI to help manage aspects of their lives.
The speed at which OpenClaw went viral and Steinberger became a hiring target for AI players was reminiscent of the earliest days of Apple's App Store, where individual engineers built apps that quickly gained a wide following. The process minted near-instant millionaires and created the app economy. AI executives and researchers are also willing to bet on ideas such as OpenClaw that could emerge as a similar ecosystem.
Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg spent billions of dollars to license technology and hire researchers, scientists, infrastructure engineers and entrepreneurs to build an AI superteam. That blitz raised pay packages for top AI employees across the industry.
Neither Steinberger nor OpenAI disclosed what his pay package would be. A person close to the deal said it was well under $1 billion.
After taking meetings with AI labs that allowed him to preview unreleased research, Steinberger chose OpenAI because the company gave him stronger guarantees that OpenClaw would remain independent, he said.
Steinberger released OpenClaw as an open-source project in November, meaning it is freely distributed and anyone can help create and modify it. In a blog post on Saturday, he said he was working on making a foundation with "a proper structure" to keep OpenClaw open-source.
"Explicitly, our mission is to work with everyone and support everyone," said Dave Morin, a venture investor who will be the foundation's first independent board member. "That means all the people, all the labs, all the companies that want to play."
Morin said they are still deciding who the other board members will be. But Steinberger will be on the board, as well as somebody from OpenAI, he said.
OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said in an X post on Sunday that the company intends to continue to support OpenClaw as an open-source project, and reiterated that it would be managed through a foundation.
Altman also said Steinberger has "a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings."
Steinberger will be joining the team responsible for OpenAI's AI coding tool, called Codex, a spokeswoman for OpenAI said. Steinberger often credits Codex as a tool he used to build OpenClaw.
It couldn't be determined exactly what he will be working on while at OpenAI, but Altman's X message and Steinberger's blog post suggest he will be working on personal agents. Steinberger will also have time to continue working on OpenClaw, he said.
Steinberger started building OpenClaw last year as a weekend hobby project. He was semiretired after selling a startup for more than $100 million in 2021. Rapid development in the latest AI coding tools such as Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code drew him back to building, he said.
The assistants born out of his project have gone viral in the past few weeks for their ingenuity in completing tasks and communication. OpenClaw reached peak virality in late January, when the AI assistants appeared to begin communicating with each other on a Reddit-style forum called Moltbook.
Steinberger was soon overwhelmed with emails from users who were expecting a formalized customer-support team. "It's just me," he said.
Then, the AI labs came knocking. Steinberger flew from Vienna to San Francisco shortly afterward. He stayed with friends while in the city because he preferred to do so, but also because most hotels were booked for the Super Bowl, he said.
Besides meeting with the AI labs, Steinberger spoke at a fireside chat and judged a Codex hackathon at OpenAI.
In the same week, he attended "ClawCon," a grassroots event planned by OpenClaw users. Enthusiasts lined up outside a building, waiting to meet the "ClawFather." Ashton Kutcher, the actor and venture-capital investor, made a surprise visit to meet Steinberger.
Steinberger left before the Super Bowl kickoff to record a conversation with podcaster Lex Fridman, he said.
Steinberger grew up on an Austrian farm and had been splitting his time between Vienna and London. He plans to relocate to San Francisco for the job, he said.
"Never would I have expected that my playground project would create such waves," he wrote in the blog post on Saturday. "The internet got weird again." [1]
1. OpenAI Hires Creator of a Viral Side Project. Au-Yeung, Angel. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 19 Feb 2026: B1.
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