Tencent’s new AI skills platform, SkillHub, has come under criticism after users found it had imported the full catalog of OpenClaw’s official marketplace ClawHub, including more than 13,000 skill packages, without notifying the project in advance. OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger said on X that Tencent had previously complained about his rate limits slowing its crawling and had pushed his server bill into the five-figure dollar range.
Screenshots on X turned a quiet rollout into a public dispute
The issue surfaced on March 12, when a user posted screenshots showing that Tencent had launched SkillHub and synchronized a large number of packages from ClawHub. Steinberger quickly responded in public, tagging Tencent Hunyuan and asking the company to support the project instead of consuming infrastructure resources at scale.
His complaint was not framed only around traffic costs. He made clear that the bigger issue, in his view, was that Tencent copied the marketplace first and only addressed the matter after it was exposed.
Tencent says the mirror reduced upstream bandwidth by 99.4%
Tencent AI’s official account replied that SkillHub served 180GB of traffic and 870,000 downloads in its first week, while pulling only 1GB from ClawHub’s origin source. Based on that figure, Tencent said the upstream bandwidth burden was reduced by roughly 99.4%.
The company also said SkillHub had consistently credited ClawHub as the source. It added that members of the team are active code contributors to OpenClaw and said Tencent was willing to become a “better sponsor.” X user Justineo joined the discussion and argued that if Tencent had already cut upstream bandwidth costs by 99.4%, it was unclear what additional help Steinberger wanted.
Founder says legality is separate from basic courtesy
Steinberger rejected that line of reasoning. He said legal compliance and courtesy are not the same thing. According to him, Tencent could have built SkillHub as OpenClaw’s fifth official mirror, shared download statistics in both directions, and created benefits for both ecosystems. That path, he said, required one simple step first: asking.
The dispute also highlights a broader difference in developer norms. The source material notes that local mirrors of open-source repositories such as npm, PyPI, and Docker Hub are common in China, and prior permission is often not required. In that context, Tencent’s move was not unusual. Steinberger’s argument focused somewhere else: whether a major technology company should treat an open-source project as a partner before replicating and distributing its work at scale.