Chinese AI rivals clash over Anthropic’s OpenClaw exit amid global token crunch

A lobster-shaped cutout representing OpenClaw stands outside the Baidu offices in Beijing, March 17, 2026.

Photo: Reuters Chinese tech companies are engaged in a public war of words as they compete to capitalise on US start-up Anthropic’s decision to pull its industry-leading Claude models from open-source AI agent tool OpenClaw.

The development comes as AI agents have triggered a huge increase in demand for AI tokens – the core metric of AI usage – raising questions about the long-term ability of industry players to meet this demand amid a growing global crunch in computational power.

On Sunday, Anthropic announced that Claude subscriptions would no longer cover usage on third-party tools like OpenClaw, a move it said was needed to “prioritise existing customers” of its own products.

Chinese companies MiniMax and Xiaomi quickly weighed in, encouraging users to switch to their own token subscription plans instead.

Several AI applications can be seen on a smartphone screen, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, Grok and DeepSeek.

Photo: dpa In a post on X, Shanghai-based MiniMax accused Anthropic of hurting the AI community by introducing its restrictions. “There will be more good ideas of how to use AI coming from outside the AI labs than in them,” MiniMax said. “Limiting AI subs to first-party products kills these ideas before they are ever born.” An increasing number of Chinese companies are rolling out token subscription plans with different pricing tiers that allow users to pay fixed amounts each month, offering better value for money than accessing AI models directly through their application programming interface, or API.

Other domestic rivals including Zhipu AI have also unveiled subscription plans in recent months, as they look to tap the lucrative AI application market of software development worth trillions of dollars, according to Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Chinese companies have been competing to offer the cheapest alternatives to premium US services from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Beijing-based Zhipu offers one of the industry’s cheapest annual subscriptions at US$84 a year, which it says offers three times more usage than Anthropic’s Claude Pro plan priced at US$204 a year.

However, price undercutting was not necessarily healthy for the industry, Xiaomi warned.

On X, MiMo team leader and former DeepSeek star researcher Luo Fuli said global computational capa

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