Dr Fazal Ali

The Hun­dred Mod­el War start­ed in 2023. From Bei­jing to the south­ern Sil­i­con Val­ley of Shen­zhen, Chi­na is im­ple­ment­ing its AI+ project, which was in­tro­duced in 2024 and ex­pand­ed in 2025.

The aim is to ac­cel­er­ate the in­te­gra­tion of AI across eco­nom­ic and so­cial sec­tors by em­bed­ding AI in man­u­fac­tur­ing, health­care, con­sump­tion, and gov­er­nance to en­hance pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and stim­u­late eco­nom­ic growth.

Af­ter the re­lease of DeepSeek, the buzz in Chi­na was about “Open­Claw”, de­vel­oped by Pe­ter Stein­berg­er from Aus­tria. Open­Claw sparked a fren­zy with peo­ple every­where ex­per­i­ment­ing with its code to build their own “lob­sters”. Pow­ered by open-source da­ta and tech­nol­o­gy, the code is avail­able to any­one who wants to cus­tomise it to de­vel­op in­dige­nous AI edge demos.

A big trend is “Bring your Own AI” (BYOAI). But BYOAI may ex­pose pro­pri­etary en­ter­prise da­ta in bu­reau­cra­cies and pri­vate com­pa­nies to un­reg­u­lat­ed ex­ter­nal en­vi­ron­ments. To ad­dress this vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, soft­ware provider Ki­lo launched Kilo­Claw for Or­gan­i­sa­tions, an en­ter­prise-grade plat­form built to rein in de­cen­tralised agent de­ploy­ments and re­store ar­chi­tec­tur­al over­sight.

Open­Claw be­came the fastest-grow­ing AI project in his­to­ry, amass­ing 230,000+ GitHub stars in un­der 14 days. The chal­lenge is that Open­Claw is built for self-host­ing. This means you need Dock­er, a serv­er, and some tech­ni­cal ca­pa­bil­i­ty to get start­ed. Dock­er is an open-source plat­form that en­ables de­vel­op­ers to build, ship, and run ap­pli­ca­tions with­in iso­lat­ed, light­weight pack­ages called con­tain­ers.

It serves as a stan­dard­ised en­vi­ron­ment, solv­ing the “it works on my ma­chine” prob­lem by en­sur­ing that soft­ware runs iden­ti­cal­ly re­gard­less of where it is de­ployed, whether on a de­vel­op­er’s lap­top or in the cloud. 

This is where Kilo­Claw found an op­por­tu­ni­ty. Kilo­Claw is a ful­ly man­aged host­ing ser­vice for Open­Claw, launched by Ki­lo Code, a plat­form serv­ing 1.5 mil­lion+ de­vel­op­ers. It takes the pow­er­ful Open­Claw Agent and han­dles all the in­fra­struc­ture in­tri­ca­cies.

Kilo­Claw han­dles: (1) Serv­er pro­vi­sion­ing and main­te­nance, (2) Dock­er con­tain­er man­age­ment, (3) Se­cu­ri­ty con­fig­u­ra­tion, (4) Au­to-up­dates, (5) Process mon­i­tor­ing and au­to-restart, and (6) Uni­fied billing through Ki­lo Gate­way.

Us­ing Kilo­Claw, or­gan­i­sa­tions now have a toolk­it to gov­ern Au­tonomous Agents and dis­cern the pres­ence of “Shad­ow AI”. Some­times, com­pa­nies spend months se­cur­ing LLMs and for­mal­is­ing ven­dor agree­ments, while de­vel­op­ers and knowl­edge work­ers be­gin act­ing in­de­pen­dent­ly.

In oth­er cas­es, work­ers be­gan by­pass­ing of­fi­cial ICT pro­cure­ment process­es by de­ploy­ing au­tonomous agents on their per­son­al in­fra­struc­ture to au­to­mate their dai­ly work­flows. This ex­posed pro­pri­etary en­ter­prise da­ta to un­reg­u­lat­ed ex­ter­nal en­vi­ron­ments.

To ad­dress this vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, Ki­lo launched Kilo­Claw for or­gan­i­sa­tions. Ki­lo tar­gets the lack of vis­i­bil­i­ty sur­round­ing per­son­al Agent de­ploy­ment. When skilled work­ers set up au­tonomous agents to parse er­ror logs, or fi­nan­cial an­a­lysts in pri­vate com­pa­nies or bu­reau­cra­cies de­ploy lo­cal scripts to rec­on­cile spread­sheets, they pri­ori­tise im­me­di­ate ef­fi­cien­cy over se­cu­ri­ty pro­to­cols.

These “Claws” of­ten gain ac­cess to cor­po­rate Slack chan­nels, Ji­ra boards, and pri­vate code repos­i­to­ries through per­son­al API keys. Since these con­nec­tions oc­cur out­side of­fi­cial IT over­sight, they may cre­ate blind spots for da­ta ex­fil­tra­tion and in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty leaks.

Kilo­Claw pro­vides a cen­tralised con­trol plane for se­cu­ri­ty teams to iden­ti­fy, mon­i­tor, and re­strict these au­tonomous ac­tors with­out hin­der­ing their pro­duc­tiv­i­ty gains.

When Open­Claw ex­plod­ed in the glob­al tech com­mu­ni­ty, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, called Open­Claw the AI era’s an­swer for or­di­nary peo­ple. Fol­low­ing Huang’s en­dorse­ment, Chi­nese tech gi­ants start­ed re­leas­ing apps built on Open­Claw. Sec­ondary school stu­dents lined up wait­ing for free, cus­tomised ver­sions. They were cu­ri­ous to find out more about the “lob­sters”. The CEO of Chee­tah Mo­bile, Fu Sheng, was as­ton­ished at how his lob­ster eas­i­ly au­to­mat­ed and sim­pli­fied many rou­tine tasks in his work­flow.

Be­cause Open­Claw was built dur­ing the 100 Mod­el War, the code re­mains avail­able to any­one in Chi­na who wants to cus­tomise it to work with Chi­nese mod­els. Af­ter all, West­ern mod­els like Chat­G­PT and Claude are not ac­ces­si­ble in Chi­na.

How­ev­er, it was not long be­fore Bei­jing’s AI se­cu­ri­ty au­thor­i­ties warned de­vel­op­ers, work­ers and stu­dents about se­ri­ous risks as­so­ci­at­ed with im­prop­er in­stal­la­tion and use of Open­Claw. Some gov­ern­ment agen­cies have since banned work­ers from in­stalling the tool. The fren­zy shift­ed from of­fer­ing to in­stall to of­fer­ing to re­move it.

This is part of Chi­na’s dis­or­der-and-con­trol top-down method. The hall­mark is that con­trol must nev­er sig­nal dis­cour­age­ment. The sig­nal is al­ways for ubiq­ui­tous in­no­va­tion and in­ven­tion that makes AI se­cu­ri­ty para­mount.

The 2025 re­lease of DeepSeek demon­strat­ed the strong en­tre­pre­neur­ial ap­petite for in­no­va­tion and re­search in Chi­na de­spite chip short­ages. It al­so un­der­scored how or­di­nary cit­i­zens are will­ing to adopt open-source plat­forms. Once Bei­jing sig­nals its pri­or­i­ties, de­mand and sup­ply take over. To dri­ve eco­nom­ic com­pet­i­tive­ness, Bei­jing sig­nals its pri­or­i­ties by sub­si­dis­ing of­fice space, pro­vid­ing seed cap­i­tal, and in­cen­tivis­ing lines of cred­it. The out­come is se­cure de­vel­op­ment built around a con­stel­la­tion of val­ues, be­liefs, tech­nolo­gies, work­ing knowl­edge, and prac­tices that lessen vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties. 

Dr Fazal Ali com­plet­ed his Mas­ter's in Phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies. He was a Com­mon­wealth Schol­ar who at­tend­ed the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge, Hugh­es Hall, the provost of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go and the act­ing pres­i­dent, and chair­man of the Teach­ing Ser­vice Com­mis­sion. He is present­ly a con­sul­tant with the IDB.