Baidu has become the first major tech company in China to sponsor the OpenClaw open-source project.

Baidu Becomes First Major Chinese Tech Sponsor of OpenClaw—Funds to Go 100% to Contributors

OpenClaw just got a major backer. Baidu's Open Source Office announced on GitHub that it's sponsoring the project—the first big Chinese tech company to do so. The timing is tight: just a day earlier, founder Peter Steinberger had publicly invited Baidu to not just deploy, but support development. Within 24 hours, the sponsorship was live.

All funds will go directly to community contributors and upstream projects—the people actually writing code, fixing bugs, and building plugins. Baidu is also plugging its PaddleOCR document parsing tech into OpenClaw as Skills, ready for devs to drop into their agent workflows. Fast move, clear intent.