Jensen Huang called it "probably the single most important release of software ever."

And he went further.

On the adoption curve, he said: "If you look at the line even in semi-log, this thing is straight up. It's vertical. It looks like the Y-axis. I've never seen anything like it."

He’s right.

In less than three months, an AI software program went from one guy's hobby to a geopolitical land-grab.

And, right now, Nvidia and China are going nuts over it.

How it All Started

This story begins in November 2025.

That’s when Austrian developer Peter Steinberger released an AI project called OpenClaw.

Nobody noticed.

Then January hit. And something happened that almost never happens in tech.

It went supernova.

Sixty thousand GitHub stars in 72 hours. Then 100,000. Then 247,000.

If you're not a developer, you might not understand what this means.

GitHub is where software lives—where every app, every platform, every piece of code that runs the modern world is stored and shared.

And when developers find something they love, they "star" it. It's a thumbs up. A signal to every other developer on earth that says: drop what you're doing. This matters.

Linux has been collecting those stars for decades.

Linux runs the internet. It runs your Android phone. It runs the servers behind Netflix and Google and Amazon. It is arguably the most important software ever written by human hands.

OpenClaw passed it in a couple of months.

That's like a band dropping their first album and outselling the Beatles’ entire career. By February.

It’s the most-starred in GitHub history. Built not by Google. Not by OpenAI. Not by a billion-dollar lab with a thousand engineers.

By one guy, in Austria, with a lobster logo.

And the most surprising part?

China’s Going Nuts Over It

Here's what makes it special.

OpenClaw isn't a chatbot. It doesn't sit there waiting for you to ask it something clever. It does things.

It clicks buttons. It fills out forms. It reads your email, manages your calendar, browses the web, writes code—all on its own, while you sleep.

Steinberger called it "the AI that actually does things."

Now here's where it gets geopolitically interesting.

China LOVES it.

Not just developers. Everyone. The elderly. Parents with their kids. One event in Shenzhen drew attendees ranging from age 11 to over 70.

Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, Baidu, and JD.com all launched competing free installation campaigns—in the same week.

Local governments started writing policy around it. Xiaomi's CEO publicly endorsed it.

Why?

The Crawl-In

Think about the average Chinese enterprise.

30 years old. Running 150-plus software systems cobbled together over decades.

None of them talk to each other. The engineers who built half of them are long gone. No documentation. No blueprints. No way in.

Getting AI to work with that mess would normally take years and a small army of developers.

This isn't unique to China, but the scale in China is particularly large given how fast the country industrialized and digitized simultaneously, bolting new systems onto old ones at a furious pace.

OpenClaw doesn't care. It looks at the screen. It doesn't need to know what's under the hood. It doesn't knock on the front door. It crawls in through the window.

It doesn't matter how old the software is. It doesn't matter if there's no documentation. It doesn't matter if the engineers who built it are long retired. If it has a screen, the lobster can use it.

Of course, there's a dark side.

Because there's always a dark side.

The Dark Side of the Claw

The mania is absolutely real.

On Taobao—China’s version of Ebay—strangers are charging up to 500 RMB (~$70) to install it for you remotely.

The top seller logged over 1,000 orders.

In America, the thing triggered an actual Mac mini shortage—people are buying dedicated machines just to keep their lobster running around the clock.

BUT…

When you install OpenClaw, it comes pre-set to talk to the whole internet. It should be set to talk only to your own machine. Most people don't know to change that. Most people don't even know the setting exists.

Over 135,000 OpenClaw running copies are currently exposed to the open internet across 82 countries.

More than 15,000 are directly vulnerable to remote takeover.

Palo Alto Networks called it a "lethal trifecta"—private data access, exposure to untrusted content, external communications, persistent memory. All in one package. All potentially compromised.

The lobster is a honeypot.

AI Agents Are Here

Nonetheless, this points to a theme we’ve been talking about for months: AI agents.

And, right now, the race is on.

While civilians are paying strangers $70 on Taobao to install their lobster, the suits are moving fast.

Microsoft just launched Copilot Cowork—built in collaboration with Anthropic—letting AI run multi-step tasks across Outlook, Teams, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Anthropic launched Claude Marketplace—a commission-free app store for enterprise tools built on Claude.

OpenAI is rumored to be shipping something soon.

Finally, NVIDIA is building NemoClaw, their own open-source agent platform.

Huang explained why he’s so excited, translated in compute math: a standard generative prompt produces one response. An agentic task consumes roughly 1,000 times more tokens.

OpenClaw agents running continuously in the background consume one million times more. In other words, every lobster running 24/7 is a gold mine for NVIDIA.

China was the opening act. The rest of the story is still being written.

And next week, after the Nvidia GTC conference in San Jose, we’re going LIVE to talk about that… and a whole lot more.

Sneak preview:

It’s a small part of our “Tech Turning Point 2026” event.

Check out the full setlist—and save the date—right here at this link.