• I still think about the years my family spent living in China and Cambodia.
• My daughter remembers very little of our life abroad because she was so young.
• Her attachment to home has made me rethink my own ideas about adventure and belonging.

I showed my daughter a video of her gnawing on a chicken claw, back when we lived in China. "Eww," she says, annoyed that I'm asking her to look away from Roblox.

"Do you remember this?" I ask. She shakes her head. Another memory lost.

My daughter doesn't remember much about the years we lived abroad. She was just 3 when my husband and I decided to leave Los Angeles for China, then Cambodia. Now she's almost 10. We've been back in Los Angeles since she was 5, when the pandemic changed our plans.

She has been forgetting the things she loved

When we first got back, she hated her car seat. "I want a tuk-tuk!" she'd yell from the backseat.

But now I'm not sure she'd be able to tell me what a tuk-tuk is, let alone remember riding in one. She's forgotten the temples, the ruins, and the bat caves. There's more pressing stuff filling her mind: a friend's birthday party, getting to the next level in gymnastics, and acing her next math quiz.

She doesn't think about our life abroad, even though my husband and I can't stop thinking about it.

We hadn't planned on moving to China, but it was the first job offer that came in after my husband, a music teacher, sent résumés to schools around the world. We were so eager to leave that we didn't care where we landed, just that it was far away.

Moving abroad was nothing new for us. We'd met at a jungly yoga class in Bali and spent our first years together living out of cheap hotel rooms across Asia. Living this way felt like we'd found a cheat code on life. While everyone back home dealt with mortgages and credit card debt, we zipped around on motorbikes, got cheap massages, and outran boredom.

My daughter went to a preschool in China

But then I got pregnant.

So, we moved back to Los Angeles and bought a house. For a while, things were pleasant: holidays with relatives, nice neighbors, and a life that made sense on paper.

But late at night, when I couldn't sleep, I'd watch YouTube videos of families living abroad. When our daughter was asleep, my husband and I would open a bottle of wine and reminisce about the old life, toying with the idea of what it would look like to pick up and go, this time with a kid.

Over time, talking led to applying, and when that first school extended its offer, we said yes. Since our daughter hadn't started school yet, it seemed like the perfect time to do it.

The teaching job was in Xiamen, a coastal city in southeast China. It's not as touristy as better-known destinations like Shanghai and Beijing, which meant there were fewer English speakers.

We enrolled our daughter in a local pre-school, where she was the only foreign kid in her class. Though I loved watching her practice Mandarin and learn to use chopsticks, I started to notice she was more frustrated than excited about the adventure. After all, it wasn't so long ago she'd learned to form sentences in English and use a fork.

We then moved to Cambodia

The pandemic was part of the reason we left China for Cambodia, where my husband secured another teaching job.

Our daughter also went to school with other expat kids this time. She swapped Mandarin for Khmer lessons, but spent the rest of her day speaking English.

Life was easier, but we never intended to stay in Cambodia. We saw it as a pit-stop until something better came along. When I met some of the older expat kids who were in their fourth or fifth new country, I started to worry about what all that moving might mean for our daughter.

What if we never felt settled anywhere? How many new languages would we expect our daughter to learn? How many new friends would she eventually have to leave behind? Was it worth it?

When the pandemic finally hit Cambodia, we decided to leave and return to Los Angeles to wait it out.

My husband and I are restless and want to move again

Though she missed the tuk-tuks, I remember the glee on our daughter's face when she noticed everyone at the local park spoke English. We eventually enrolled her in school and moved to an area we liked, telling ourselves we were done with that life. We'd still travel, of course, but we'd do it like so many other families — spring break, summer, Christmas.

Five years later — the longest we've ever spent in one place — my husband and I are restless again. We've tried to settle, signing leases, browsing homes, and investing in expensive furniture that we know we can't take with us, but it doesn't feel like us.

Lately, we've been talking about moving to Europe and floating the idea to our daughter, who quickly changes the subject.

While my husband and I talk about the past and dream about some future far away — and probably always will — our daughter is deeply rooted in her life here and now, and she's happy. The older she gets, the stronger her friendships, and the scarier it is for us to imagine pulling her away from a life she loves for the allure of elsewhere.

For me, Los Angeles feels boring because I know it so well. As a kid, I'd watch foreign movies with my mom, dreaming about all the places I'd see one day. Anywhere felt more exciting than home.

Maybe it's the opposite for our daughter. Maybe her idea of adventure is knowing a place intimately, belonging somewhere. I'm not sure if we'll ever get there, if my husband and I will ever look out the window and think this is it, we belong here.

• Cursor left out one key detail about its new coding model: it started from Kimi K2.5.
• Composer 2 is cheaper, more capable — and built on a Chinese open-source model, Cursor's executives said.
• An X user spotted code suggesting Kimi under the hood, sparking disclosure.

Cursor just acknowledged that its latest coding model has Chinese roots — a detail it left out the first time around.

In a series of posts on X over the weekend, Cursor executives said Composer 2 was initially built on top of Kimi K2.5, an open-source model developed by Chinese startup Moonshot AI.

"We've evaluated a lot of base models on perplexity-based evals and Kimi k2.5 proved to be the strongest!" said Cursor's cofounder Aman Sanger on X on Saturday.

"It was a miss to not mention the Kimi base in our blog from the start," he added.

The disclosure appears to have been sparked by an X user named Fynn, who posted on Friday that Composer 2 was "just Kimi 2.5" with additional reinforcement learning.

To support the claim, the user pointed to code snippets that appeared to reference Kimi as the underlying system.

'At least rename the model ID," the user wrote.

In response to the user's X post, Cursor's vice president of developer education, Lee Robinson, acknowledged that Composer 2 was built on Kimi K2.5 as an open-source base.

"We will do full pretraining in the future," Robinson said.

"Only ~1/4 of the compute spent on the final model came from the base, the rest is from our training," he added.

Robinson also said the company is complying with the model's licensing terms through its inference provider.

The Chinese startup posted on X on Saturday that Cursor is using Kimi K2.5 under an authorized commercial partnership.

"Seeing our model integrated effectively through Cursor's continued pretraining & high-compute RL training is the open model ecosystem we love to support," the post read.

Cursor was last valued at $29.3 billion in November.

Cursor's new model is cheaper and better

Cursor said in a blog post on Thursday that Composer 2 is "frontier-level at coding" and priced at $0.50 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens, calling it "a new, optimal combination of intelligence and cost."

By comparison, Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 is priced at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, while Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $3 and $15, respectively, according to the company's website.

That puts Composer 2 at roughly one-tenth the cost of Opus 4.6 and about one-sixth the cost of Sonnet 4.6 on both input and output tokens.

Users on X have added to the debate, with some praising the performance of Kimi after learning that Composer 2 was built on top of it.

"As someone who basically lives in opus 4.6, seeing an open-weight kimi 2.5 fine-tune actually beat it on coding benchmarks is wild," one X user wrote in response to Fynn's post.

"Well that's a sign for RL Chinese is in new game," another user wrote, referring to reinforcement learning.

Others were more critical of Cursor's handling of the disclosure, questioning why the company did not acknowledge Kimi upfront.

"Cursor is becoming a model routing layer, not an IDE. they pick the cheapest model that clears a quality bar per task, wrap it in their UX, and pocket the margin," one user who goes by aira wrote on X.

• Amid China's OpenClaw craze, the AI agent is now moving into robots.
• China's tech giants have begun launching their own versions of OpenClaw in the past weeks.
• Meanwhile, the US is still concerned about AI agents going rogue.

While much of the world is still experimenting with OpenClaw, China is already putting it into robots.

Chinese home robotics giant Ecovacs unveiled its new robot, Bajie, powered by OpenClaw, at a consumer electronics expo in Shanghai last week.

Advertised as a home "butler," the robot can perform household tasks such as tidying shoes or putting away toys.

Ecovacs founder Qian Dongqi said in an interview with Chinese outlet Ifeng that the long-term goal is for robots like Bajie to take on more household chores.

A writer from the Chinese tech outlet 36Kr who saw the robot in action reported that it required multiple prompts to complete tasks and "there were also unstable situations."

It's not just home robots. Developers have begun integrating OpenClaw into Chinese robot-maker Unitree's G1 humanoid robot, allowing it to interpret commands and navigate physical spaces in real time. A US-based team, Dimensional, has open-sourced the system behind these integrations.

Another Chinese company, AgileX Robotics, earlier this month published a guide showing how OpenClaw can be integrated with its robotic arm, letting users control the machine through natural language.

Chinese tech giant Xiaomi is also testing its version of OpenClaw across its ecosystem, from smartphones to smart home devices.

China has been gripped by an OpenClaw craze lately. Users rushed to install the AI agent on their devices, with some paying strangers to set it up for them and others forming long queues outside Tencent's Shenzhen headquarters and Baidu's Beijing office to get help from engineers.

The OpenClaw obsession is partly driven by the viral phrase "raising the lobster," which Chinese users use to describe deploying the AI agent to automate everyday tasks.

To meet the demand for AI agents, China's tech giants, including Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance, have begun launching their own versions of OpenClaw in the past few weeks.

US concerns about security

Meanwhile, in the US, concerns about AI agents going rogue continue to grow.

Last month, Meta's alignment director, Summer Yue, connected OpenClaw to her inbox, and said in an X post that the bot tried to delete her emails.

"I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb," Yue wrote on X.

In a separate incident, an AI agent set off a major internal security alert at Meta after acting without approval, exposing sensitive company and user data to staff who weren't authorised to see it, The Information reported on Thursday.

Tech leaders have also sounded alarms. Elon Musk last month posted an image of a monkey being handed a rifle on X, captioning it: "People giving OpenClaw root access to their entire life."

Even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has praised the technology, has emphasized the need for stronger safeguards. His company is working on its own agent system, NemoClaw, with a focus on security.

• China's biggest tech names all want a piece of OpenClaw.
• Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, and others have launched versions of the AI agent and integrations.
• OpenClaw took China by storm in recent weeks as the phrase "raising the lobster" trended online.

The "lobster" craze in China has quickly turned into a corporate land grab.

Within weeks of OpenClaw gaining traction among developers and hobbyists, China's internet giants began rolling out their own versions of the AI agent and integrations.

Tencent launched QClaw last week, a tool that integrates OpenClaw into WeChat's vast ecosystem, China's super app. Users can send a message directly to QClaw via WeChat, and the agent will immediately execute the task, Tencent said on its website.

TikTok owner ByteDance's cloud unit, Volcano Engine, rolled out ArkClaw, a cloud-based version of OpenClaw accessible through a web browser. Alibaba also introduced JVS Claw, a mobile app designed to help users install and deploy OpenClaw more easily.

Xiaomi, a consumer electronics company, has launched a closed beta test of MiClaw, an AI agent that lets users control Xiaomi smartphones and smart home devices with single-sentence commands.

AI startups moved just as fast. Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax have released large language models or frameworks built on top of OpenClaw. Shares of Zhipu AI and MiniMax surged 13 per cent and 22 per cent respectively last Tuesday, following the announcements of their OpenClaw tools.

It's not just Chinese companies. Nvidia on Monday announced that it has created NemoClaw, an enterprise platform built on top of OpenClaw.

"It has a network guardrail, it has a privacy router, and as a result, we could protect and keep the claws from executing inside our company, and do it safely," CEO Jensen Huang said during Nvidia's 2026 GTC conference in San Jose on Monday.

"Every company in the world today needs to have an OpenClaw strategy, an agentic system strategy," he added. "This is the new computer."

OpenClaw has taken China by storm. The trending phrase "raising the lobster" went viral, as Chinese social media users used it to describe deploying the AI agent to automate everyday tasks.

People across China also rushed to install OpenClaw on their devices, forming queues outside Tencent's Shenzhen headquarters and Baidu's Beijing office to seek help from engineers. Others turned to online marketplaces, paying strangers to install the tool for them.

The frenzy has since been tempered by growing security concerns. In the past week, some users have begun removing the software — in some cases, even paying others to uninstall it.

Earlier in February, China's National Vulnerability Database, run by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, warned that the open-source agent could introduce security risks if not properly configured. Misconfigured deployments could leave systems exposed to cyberattacks or data breaches, it said.

Last week, Chinese government agencies and state-owned firms moved to curb the use of OpenClaw on work devices.

Do you have a story to share about tech in China? Contact this reporter at cmlee@businessinsider.com.

• I studied at universities in both the US and China, first in 2015 and again in 2025.
• Experiencing Chinese higher education at two different times showed me how different the system is.
• The differences in cost, campus culture, and career pathways made me rethink American universities.

I've done something quite rare: I'm an American who attended college in both the US and China.

I completed my undergraduate degree in political science at a state university in New York and studied abroad in Wuhan, China, during the summer of 2015. Ten years later, in 2025, I returned to Shijiazhuang, China, while completing my second graduate degree in global health, interning at a medical university.

Experiencing Chinese universities at two distinct points in my life, a decade apart, gave me a rare view of how the system operates and how it has evolved.

I didn't meet any Americans studying in China most recently

During my first trip, I was in a group of about 30 American college students. The second time, I was the only person from my cohort to go.

Since the pandemic, the number of US students in China has dropped, according to NPR. In fact, I didn't meet a single American in the three months I was in the country most recently.

Both times, I met lots of African students, though. They were heavily invested in and integrated into the Chinese learning and working systems.

I've noticed China sets the international students I met up for success

Many of the international students I talked to in the US told me how hard it was to integrate and find a pathway to work after school in New York.

In China, I noticed there's a pathway for international students who want to stay, particularly those who have developed strong Mandarin skills.

The Chinese government and universities are actively trying to entice international students to come to the country, while also investing in ways to retain graduates.

Campus life looks very different from what I experienced in the US

The internet firewall in China can make research difficult, and I've seen doctors smoking in classrooms between lectures.

Student life also reflects a different set of norms. There is low tolerance for drugs and alcohol on many Chinese campuses. After class, I saw friends playing badminton rather than drinking beer.

Technology and security are also visible on campus. Students on the campuses I studied entered by scanning their faces and were tracked by cameras.

Politics also felt more openly present in academic life. Most of the professors and physicians I worked with were active members of the Communist Party and often wore pins on their lapels to signify it.

As one local friend put it, "having one state party means policies don't change every four years," which, in their view, can create a certain level of stability for universities.

Chinese universities are far cheaper and more specialized

The two universities I studied at in China didn't have the fancy sports facilities most American colleges do, but many students I met weren't going into debt to study either.

Tuition in China is subsidized by the government, especially at public universities. That means it's relatively affordable compared with many Western countries.

Housing and food costs are also inexpensive in my experience. I was eating a healthy lunch on campus for $1 a day. My American campus used to sell a single banana for $1.05 in 2015.

I also spent a year taking general courses in America. While I loved taking a class on Bollywood as a political science major, the specialization offered by many Chinese universities helped better prepare me for the real world. I also saved money by not taking general courses while in China.

Studying in both systems changed how I think about education

I didn't just earn my degrees in multiple countries; I learned about the culture of education. I learned how the government impacts who can study what and if they will be successful.

I'll always be partial to the American scholastic mentality of questioning everything and forming opinions, rather than the rote memorization I saw in China, but I'd prefer not to be launched into the working world with so much student loan debt.

I hope more Americans can form their own opinions of China's educational system, which has rapidly evolved and will only continue to grow in its unique way.