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

On March 12, a user spotted that Tencent had launched a platform called SkillHub, which bulk-imported all skill packages from OpenClaw’s official skill market ClawHub—accompanied by screenshots showing extensive data sync records. The post quickly gained traction. OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger immediately hit back, noting he’d previously received emails complaining his rate limit was “too slow for crawling.” He criticized Tencent for draining his server resources without any support, adding ClawHub’s server costs are now approaching five figures. He directly tagged Tencent’s Mixed Reality team’s official account: “Can you help chip in instead of pushing my server costs to five digits?” Tencent’s AI official account later responded publicly, framing SkillHub as a “localized skill platform built on the OpenClaw ecosystem” designed to offer Chinese users better usability and speed. Tencent emphasized it always credits ClawHub as the source and shared first-week metrics: 180GB of user traffic processed (870,000 downloads), but only 1GB of non-concurrent requests pulled from ClawHub’s official source. The company also noted its team members are active code contributors (with submitted code and PRs) and are open to being a better sponsor. Steinberger wasn’t convinced by the response: “That’s not the point. We could’ve aligned to make SkillHub an official fifth mirror with synced download stats. The polite move would’ve been to ask first.” Mirroring open-source projects is common in China’s developer ecosystem (npm, PyPI, Docker Hub all have numerous Chinese mirrors), and Tencent’s response addressed Steinberger’s initial core concerns. Still, he’s focused on prior communication over post-hoc explanations. His proposed “official mirror with synced stats” is a stronger solution, and the two sides aren’t far from a cooperation agreement.