A lobster-shaped AI on a stick

What it does U-Claw (虾盘 / “shrimp drive”) is a build recipe and source kit for turning the OpenClaw AI assistant framework into a portable USB payload. Run a setup script, copy the portable/ directory to a flash drive, then double-click to launch on Mac or Windows without installing anything. There’s also a one-liner curl installer if you’d rather skip the U盘 ritual entirely.

The interesting bit The project is aggressively China-optimized: all scripts default to domestic mirrors (npm, Node.js, Electron), bundles DeepSeek/Kimi/Qwen out of the box, and integrates QQ, Feishu, and WeChat alongside Telegram and Discord. It even fingerprints your USB stick or motherboard to auto-generate a cloud API key locally—no login, no upload, though you’ll need to top up the balance yourself.

Key highlights

• ~2.3GB payload, fits on a 4GB drive; exFAT recommended to avoid symlink carnage
• Bootable Linux variant via Ventoy + Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for bare-metal machines
• Electron desktop app alternative with unsigned .dmg and .exe releases
• Multi-model switching through a Config.html interface, configs persist on the drive
• Windows support marked 🚧 “in development”; Mac Apple Silicon and Intel fully covered

Caveats

• Unsigned binaries trigger SmartScreen/Gatekeeper warnings; the README documents the bypasses
• Node.js version conflicts are a recurring FAQ theme—v24 breaks things, v20/v22 required
• The QQ bot plugin ships uncompiled TypeScript in some bundles; releases are the safer bet

Verdict Worth a look if you need offline-portable AI tooling for Chinese platforms or want to hand someone a “just plug it in” AI stick. Skip it if you’re all-in on cloud-native deployments or allergic to manually managing Node runtimes.