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Artificial intelligence
TechPolicy

China’s cloud giants race to support Moltbot, the ‘AI that actually does things’

Hyperscalers embrace the AI agent, which can execute tasks without step-by-step instructions, but privacy concerns loom large

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The global AI industry is moving towards developing AI agents capable of autonomously executing tasks on behalf of users. Photo: Shutterstock
Vincent Chow
China’s artificial intelligence hyperscalers have quickly added cloud support for Moltbot, formerly known as Clawdbot, an open-source AI agent that has exploded in popularity globally.

Billed as the “AI that actually does things”, Moltbot’s ability to autonomously execute tasks without the user directing each action has caused waves in the global developer community, briefly lifting shares of US web infrastructure giant Cloudflare in pre-market trading on Tuesday before they later retreated.

This week, three of China’s biggest cloud service providers – Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud and ByteDance’s unit Volcano Engine – began offering access to Moltbot with support from their respective suite of models. Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud services unit of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the SCMP.
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While the AI agent was initially only compatible with foreign messaging apps such as Telegram and WhatsApp, Chinese tech giants have enabled interaction through their respective services, including Alibaba’s workplace collaboration platform DingTalk and Tencent Holdings’ WeCom, the work version of super app WeChat.

Smaller cloud providers have also added Moltbot, including the cloud unit of JD.com and Shanghai-based UCloud.

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Created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, Moltbot is able to send messages, delete emails and manage files on a user’s computer autonomously. The AI agent, which users can interact with through messaging apps, has drawn attention not only for its powerful task-execution abilities but also because it was developed using another AI coding tool, without Steinberger writing the code.
Moltbot users are required to hand over large amounts of information, raising privacy concerns. Photo: Shutterstock
Moltbot users are required to hand over large amounts of information, raising privacy concerns. Photo: Shutterstock
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