By Che Pan and Brenda Goh
BEIJING, Feb 5 (Reuters) – China’s industry ministry on Thursday warned that the OpenClaw open-source AI agent, which gained global popularity in recent weeks, could pose significant security risks when improperly configured and expose users to cyberattacks and data breaches.
The country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said it had discovered instances where users were operating OpenClaw with inadequate security settings and said better precautions needed to be taken.
The warning doesn’t constitute an outright ban. But the ministry cautioned that organizations deploying OpenClaw should conduct thorough audits of public network exposure, implement robust identity authentication and access controls.
OpenClaw has had a viral rise since it was first introduced in November, receiving more than 100,000 stars on code repository GitHub and drawing in 2 million visitors in a single week, according to a blog post by its creator Peter Steinberger.
It has also been growing in popularity among Chinese technology enthusiasts, with cloud service providers rushing to offer hosting solutions for the rapidly growing platform.
China’s largest cloud service providers, including Alibaba’s Alicloud and Tencent Cloud and Baidu, have launched services allowing users to rent servers to run OpenClaw remotely, rather than on personal devices, according to the companies’ OpenClaw deployment pages.
OpenClaw gained attention this week after the emergence of a new social network called Moltbook that is advertised as being exclusively for the use of OpenClaw bots. Cybersecurity firm Wiz said on Monday that the network had a major flaw that exposed private data on thousands of people.
(Reporting by Shi Bu, Che Pan and Brenda GohEditing by Ros Russell)
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