Tencent Bulk Imports ClawHub Entire Skill Set to Build Own Platform, Responds to "Forking" Accusations with "It's Mirroring, Not Forking," Drawing Ire from OpenClaw Founder

BlockBeats News, March 12th, a user today discovered that Tencent has created a platform called SkillHub, which bulk imported all skill packages from the OpenClaw official skill market ClawHub, and attached screenshots showing a large amount of data synchronization records. The post quickly attracted attention.

OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger immediately responded, stating that he had previously received emails complaining that the rate limit he set was "too slow to crawl," criticizing Tencent for heavily consuming his server resources without providing any support, and that ClawHub's server costs are facing a rise to five digits. He directly @'d Tencent's Mixed Reality team official account, questioning, "Can you help support a bit instead of pushing my server costs to five digits?"

Tencent's AI official account subsequently responded publicly, defining SkillHub as a "localized skill platform built on the OpenClaw ecosystem," aimed at providing better usability and speed for Chinese users. Tencent emphasized always labeling ClawHub as the source and disclosed first-week operational data: processed 180GB of traffic for users (870,000 downloads), but only pulled 1GB of non-concurrent requests from the ClawHub official source. Tencent also stated that team members are active code contributors (submitted code and PRs) and are willing to be better sponsors.

Steinberger, after seeing the response, still didn't buy it: "That's not the point. We could have aligned and made SkillHub an official fifth mirror, syncing download statistics. The polite thing to do would have been to ask first." Mirroring open-source projects is a common practice in the Chinese developer ecosystem (npm, PyPI, Docker Hub, etc. all have many Chinese mirrors), and Tencent's response has already addressed Steinberger's initial core concerns. However, Steinberger is evidently more concerned about prior communication rather than post-explanation. His proposed "make it an official mirror, sync download stats" is a better solution, and the two parties are not far from reaching a cooperation.