Artificial-intelligence superusers in China are rushing to test out Moltbot, the AI assistant that has gone viral in Silicon Valley, with cloud providers offering special packages to early adopters.
Developed by Austrian entrepreneur Peter Steinberger, Moltbot, an open-source AI agent, has excited the tech community with its ability to learn about users’ habits, take control of their devices, and proactively complete tasks without being prompted at every step. It was previously called Clawdbot, before Claude owner Anthropic asked Steinberger to change its name.
To use Moltbot, one has to install it on a server, and connect it to a large language model — a complicated process for the nontechnical. To attract aspiring users, Chinese cloud providers including AlibabaAlibabaAlibaba, founded in 1999 by Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma, is one of the most prominent global e-commerce companies that operates platforms like AliExpress, Taobao, and Tmall.READ MORE Cloud, TencentTencentBest known for its super-app WeChat, Tencent is a Chinese technology conglomerate and a major player in the video gaming industry.READ MORE Cloud, and ByteDanceByteDanceByteDance is a Chinese internet technology company that owns TikTok and Douyin, a Chinese version of TikTok with a successful e-commerce arm.READ MORE’s Volcano Engine have offered Moltbot access combined with their own compute packages.
On Tencent Cloud, for example, it costs between $10 and $76 a year to rent a domestic server for Moltbot, depending on memory size and speed.
Subscribers can choose to power Moltbot with Chinese LLMs such as DeepSeek, and communicate with their AI assistant through Chinese messaging apps, including Alibaba’s DingTalk, Tencent’s QQ, and ByteDance’s Lark. They need to pay extra for the tokens used.
Those who want to install Moltbot on their own devices have help available as well. On the secondhand marketplace Xianyu, at least dozens of sellers offer to teach people how to install Moltbot on their devices, or to do it for them through remote control. Prices range from $1 to about $22.
Moltbot has received more than 100,000 stars on GitHub, although it’s unclear how many people use it. Early adopters have shared mixed reviews online. On Chinese social network Xiaohongshu, Moltbot users posted about telling the bot to write codes, organize calendars, check stock prices, and reply to messages.
One user, who works in cross-border e-commerce, wrote that they had tasked Moltbot with reading and replying to large amounts of inquiry emails — the bot did it well. Another discovered Moltbot was taking notes on the user’s personality: curious, passionate about AI, and willing to trust others. “How is it different from being in a relationship?” the user joked.
Others have found Moltbot to be overhyped. The bot is difficult to install and compute-intensive, making it expensive to run. It also constantly runs into bugs and makes mistakes, such as deleting the wrong files. “It feels like a wild bison rampaging around in my computer,” a user commented.
Still, the excitement around Moltbot is spreading as tech enthusiasts around the world eagerly await the next chapter of the AI revolution: something that goes beyond coding and answering questions, and into everyday chores.
Tech giants are now racing to build AI assistants. Anthropic recently introduced Claude Cowork, an agent tool that can organize files and create spreadsheets. Meta has acquired Manus, a China-origin AI agent product that can automate social media posts and screen resumes. Neither tool is available in China.
In China, Alibaba’s Qwen recently rolled out agentic features to allow users to order food deliveries, make travel bookings, and shop online by talking to the chatbot. ByteDance in December released prototypes of an AI smartphone, with which users can operate apps by talking to a chatbot.
Cybersecurity experts have warned of the privacy and security risks of giving rudimentary agents too much autonomy. Agents like Moltbot can send out the wrong emails, and worse, accidentally leak users’ sensitive information and credentials.
