Chinese engineers cloned OpenClaw in a single day and shrunk its memory footprint 99%. The result runs on cheap hardware (think the super-small Raspberry Pi mini-computer), boots in one second, and is already driving serious market movement.
Raspberry Pi Holdings PLC's (LSE:RPI) stock is having an unusual moment.
Shares jumped 8% on Tuesday alone and are up 59% over the past month, a rally that began with the emergence of OpenClaw, an AI agent capable of managing emails, booking meetings, and connecting to Telegram. But the bigger story now is what happened after OpenClaw arrived.
A team of Chinese engineers took the original and rebuilt it from scratch in 24 hours.
The clone that could run on a £14 computer
The result is PicoClaw, a version of OpenClaw that is 99% smaller than the original in terms of memory footprint. Where OpenClaw requires roughly 1 gigabyte of RAM to operate, PicoClaw runs on less than 10 megabytes.
That gap is the difference between needing a capable server and being able to run the same software on a Raspberry Pi that starts at just £13.50 for the Zero W model and £108 for the Series-5.
Boot times tell a similar story. OpenClaw takes over 500 seconds to start up. PicoClaw is ready in one second.
The functionality, according to the engineers behind it, is unchanged.
Email management, meeting scheduling, Telegram integration, all of it carries over from the original. The software simply does the same job with a fraction of the resources.
How AI wrote most of its own replacement
One detail from the project has attracted particular attention: 95% of PicoClaw's code was written by an AI agent, not by the engineers directly.
The humans appear to have directed and reviewed the process rather than authored it line by line.
That framing has amplified the story considerably on social media, where the combination of a one-day build time, AI-generated code, and hardware accessibility has made PicoClaw a talking point well beyond the usual developer circles.
It is that chatter, analysts and observers have noted, that is now sustaining Raspberry Pi's share price momentum.
Open source and freely available
PicoClaw is released under the MIT license, meaning anyone can use, modify, and redistribute the code without restriction.
That openness matters for the Raspberry Pi angle specifically: a low-cost device running freely available software represents a meaningful shift in who can deploy AI agents and at what price point.
The original OpenClaw sparked investor interest by demonstrating that a Raspberry Pi machine could run capable AI agent software at all. PicoClaw makes that proposition considerably easier to act on.