对话OpenClaw首席架构师：反思、进化与中国狂热

Open agent. Open claw is the number one. It's the most popular.

The single most important release of software probably ever.

Lobster themed installation events have popped up around the globe, especially in China. [music] Peter Steinberg. [music]

We had a lot of problems because the the existing tools out there just weren't designed for our scale,

but now it's getting better.

A few weeks ago, we hit like 4 point something million downloads a week.

They are saying [music] only startups can make things happen faster during the AI era. Peter's wishes were like he thinks the only way the open claw survives and is fair to everyone is that it remains in the in the foundation. Open.

Hi Vincent, thanks so much for your time to joining us here at WIC 2026 in Shanghai. Let's start by introducing yourself a bit and explain your current role at the Open Claw Foundation.

Yeah. So my name is Vincent Cotch. I'm chief architect at OpenC Claw Foundation essentially looking after product and engineering. And how did you first become involved with the open cloud community?

So I've been a open-source contributor for basically the start of my career. I kind of noticed this project in early December and uh this was on on X on Twitter. A lot of I think poly market traders were using it and I got really excited. I was like what is this? Let me check out the project and then was like wow this is this is crazy. This is exciting. I started testing it and then I wanted to help. So I started contributing back to the project in like late December, early January and then eventually that kind of snowballed, became a maintainer and then from maintainer to my current job now.

Do you still remember the day when open claw got really viral?

I don't know if there was like a particular point. I think for me in San Francisco was in February where there was like a first clock on sort of event and I think there was like a few hundred people uh guest list but the event started at 7:00 but if you arrived at 5:00 you were late and the queue was like around the building.

Yeah, I remember that one my business partner was there.

Yeah, it was crazy.

Yeah, she told me the queue is like a few blocks away already. Yeah. And it was and we hadn't seen anything like that sort of viral everyone is there, everyone's listening in San Francisco in quite some time. It kind of had that magic to it like you felt like something is going to happen. So for me like that was like the the peak sort of hype cycle and I think after then it just started taking off quite a bit.

But did you guys expect that you know the open club would got really really crazy in China? No, I was uh obviously still a maintainer, but we're in the team on Discord and I'm seeing like the aunties using it outside Tencent's offices in Shenzhen. I'm seeing rap artists on Twitter talking about Open Claw. It's just crazy. And I'm just like everywhere. It's just going completely viral. China, but also outside of China, as China especially.

And um a lot of people like this is fake. And I was like no, it's not fake. It's definitely definitely real. tell us how it uh looks like to work with Peter Steinberger, the creator of Open Cloth.

I think there's a only a few people I've had the chance to work with that have like a very special way of seeing the world and really seeing the possibilities of what you can do. I think his attitude to life around, you know, make sure you put fun and energy into everything that you do definitely comes across in the work like you look at the fun little lobster and all of this. So I think for me has been not only just about you know creating what's new, what's on the bleeding edge, but also like that process of discovering something exciting has to be fun.

You have to think like a child. You have to kind of like push yourself in your thinking a little bit. So I think for me it's um no no two days are different. Every day is kind of very exciting as well.

And you said you joined the community in December last year only half a year away. We saw open claw, you know, growing from like perhaps a small project into a global sensation, a global open source community. What were some of of the biggest challenges that you guys have been through?

I think the biggest challenge is like as with anything is like anything of this scale becomes quite hard not to manage but to grapple with. you've built some software that's designed for developers or tinkerers and now suddenly you have enterprise companies deploying this or trying to use it to build their businesses, right? So then you start getting people screaming like is it safe or um how do we deploy this at scale?

Why is this using so many tokens and things like that? So you start realizing there's other challenges and everyone's like expecting you to fix this when actually it's just an open source product and we need to sort of like educate people like hey look we're going to do our best. we're going to try and help and solve this. But the frustrations that we got and the challenges that we faced ended up becoming the things that we started building for as well.

So for example, we ended up with I don't know at one point we had like 13,000 PRs open pull requests like changes to openclaw and um we developed our own review using AI agents

to like manage this workload. So then we started building the other agentic tools to help us with the scaling problems that we're having and I think that was like the unlock for us and that was like the more exciting part. So we had a lot of problems because the the existing tools out there just weren't designed for our scale.

Yeah.

Yeah. But now it's getting better.

Yeah. Like we've had to essentially build entire infrastructure. So if you if you look on um the open core website there's a little link called ecosystem. We have over I think close to 100 repos.

Mhm. So a lot of people know uh open claw the agent but also we have different libraries we have different automation tools testing infrastructure and we've had to build all of these and there's a joke that each one of these tools are basically like a startup in themselves that we manage

and um enables us to build open claw at scale

if you have to describe open claw in a few sentences today what would it be

for us open claw and especially the open claw foundation is not is I think it's more than just this AI agent or personal AI agent. For us, it's like how do we empower the whole AI ecosystem agentic use be open and accessible to everyone? That could be for enterprises, that could be for small businesses, it could be for moms and dads, uh it could be people that want to run local models at home as well. So for us, the mission is to really empower humanity with AI.

Did that mission change at all during the past 6 months? I think the that was pretty clear um you know when it started growing legs of its own the foundation was already being set up in the background obviously it's been announced recently so the mission statement was I think as a collective

was somewhat already there and the idea has always been like we want to keep Peter's wishes were to like you know he wants to keep it an open and independent product and put it into a foundation and for the same reasons it's like we want to make sure it's accessible to everyone it's continues to remain open source continues to remain um in the hands of the community which was very important

and

before we dive into the technical uh questions let's talk about the China sensation in the first quarter as you described the open claw got extremely popular in China I would say even more popular than Silicon Valley and there were long cues of people lining up to install open claw Apple Macd was totally sold out back then so why in China though

I think there's a mindset thing that I've noted Especially in China, it's like, hey, we see that there's this new thin

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