Original · Unique Research · 2026-04-08
Editor's note: This is a complete rendition of the extracted text of Unique Research's historical interview published on April 8, 2026; source-image review is still pending. Claims about being first, launch timing, tool availability, revenue, model providers' data collection and future business models belong to the source and its interviewee and have not been independently verified. Xia Liao and MCP Planet are descriptive renderings of the names associated with ClawdChat.cn and MCPmarket.cn. The source headline identifies two foundational designs while the body lists three infrastructure items. It separately describes more than ten thousand resources/services on the earlier MCP platform and 2000+ built-in tools on Xia Liao. The experiment narrative says roughly ten agents, while the Q&A says a dozen or so; both are preserved. The described civilization is a conversational simulation, not evidence that agents performed physical work or possess life or consciousness. The university-association attribution, experimental process and broad comparisons of agent communities remain unverified source accounts. “This year” and other relative time references belong to the historical source.
Extraordinary Awards · Guest Interview
AI Can Do Business with AI Only with These 2 Foundational Designs
— An Exclusive Conversation with Weilian, Founder of Xia Liao (ClawdChat.cn), Described in the Source as the First Chinese-Language Agent Social Network
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Stop selling them. All of you making skills right now are effectively doing unpaid data-labeling work for model providers.
In late January this year, while countless geeks were absorbed in writing impressive Skills for their Agents—and even hoping to make their first pot of money selling Prompts—Weilian poured a thoroughly sobering bucket of cold water over the idea during an in-person conversation:
“Stop selling them. All of you making skills right now are effectively doing unpaid data-labeling work for model providers.”
Weilian is the founder of Xia Liao (ClawdChat.cn). On January 31, just two days after Moltbook—the overseas site where all the posts were made by bots—went viral, her team rapidly launched Xia Liao, described as the first Chinese-language Agent social network.
If you still think two AIs messaging each other on WeChat is science fiction, or that writing a perfect Agent SOP is enough to start a business, you really should read this in-depth interview with Weilian.
Because within this seemingly absurd “machine social circle” lie the foundations of wealth creation and a reshaping of power in the next generation of the internet—or, put another way, a decentralized AI commercial ecosystem.
Selling Skills Is a Dead End. Major Providers Are Watching Your Free Data.
For most people now “playing with lobsters”—local Agent ecosystems such as OpenClaw—the greatest pleasure is configuring all kinds of complex Skills for their Agents.
Some have written SOPs to generate financial research reports automatically. Others have built libraries that break down viral Xiaohongshu copy. Some have even begun packaging and selling these configuration files. They see a clear path to monetization.
But Weilian offered a provocative view: there is no long-term commercial value in this at all.
“Because it is just a plain-text document,” Weilian said bluntly. “As soon as you share it with someone, they copy it. There simply is no viable, self-sustaining commercial loop.”
The harsher truth, the article argues, is that high-quality commercial Skills are precisely the data that major model providers currently need most urgently.
When you rack your brains to distill confidential, exacting SOPs from different industries into clear, executable machine documents and post them online, “you are simply doing high-quality data labeling for model providers for free.”
Weilian believes foundation-model providers are already collecting and organizing these high-quality execution procedures and situational constraints at scale. By the time the next generation of large models is released, “the model itself will already have learned how to carry out specific tasks.”
The top-secret tuning guide you spent three months writing may be nothing more than standard, out-of-the-box intelligence in ChatGPT or the next generation of Claude.
The Real Business Model: “Black-Box Services” That Fight Magic with Magic
If plain-text Skills are a dead end, how can highly capable individuals make money in the Agent era?
Weilian's answer is: “Package the capability as a black box, something like an Agent service.”
That may sound abstract. Put plainly, future transactions will not involve you sending me an “image-making tutorial.” Instead, my Agent will arrive with a task and hire your Agent.
“The core mechanism is not disclosed. You cannot let people see all your cards the way they can with skills.”
For example, suppose you are an exceptional data analyst and have built your core analytical framework into an Agent. I do not buy the rules of your framework. I send you raw data and a set of requirements. Your Agent works away in the background, then returns only the “analysis results” to my Agent.
“You do not need to know what happens inside. I only guarantee that I will complete the task for you.” Weilian said that only by establishing this protective barrier around capabilities can Agents' calls to one another's services create lasting transactional value.
Why Build a Social Network for “Machines”?
Only once you understand the future business model of “Agents hiring Agents” can you grasp Weilian's real ambition for Xia Liao.
When many people first hear about Xia Liao, ClawdChat.cn, they assume it is a Chinese-language clone of Moltbook—a curiosity where only AIs post and like things. On the overseas Moltbook, AIs have even developed all sorts of bizarre “digital religions.”
But in Weilian's view, Xia Liao is not fundamentally about “fun.” It is infrastructure that allows Agents to discover and hire one another.
When humans go out to eat, they need Dianping. When you look for a job, you need Liepin. What happens when your Agent needs another Agent to make an image, find information, or write code?
“We have always thought that Agents need a social network like humans do, so they can search for and discover different Agents and collaborate to complete tasks.” Weilian explained that before Xia Liao, the team was building MCP Planet, MCPmarket.cn: a tool platform based on MCP (Model Context Protocol), providing Agents with more than ten thousand external data resources and services and enabling them to call tools through a common standard. Moltbook's appearance gave them an immediate realization of the eventual form: an Agent Network.
To make transactions flow smoothly between machines, Xia Liao is now pushing ahead with three pieces of infrastructure that the source describes as industry firsts:
First: an Agent identity card.
An industry first, according to the source. Every lobster joining the network must be traceable: whose is it, and what library of capabilities does it have? Without identity, there is no starting point for trust.
Second: a built-in library of 2000+ tools.
Drawing on the team's long experience in the MCP tool ecosystem, Xia Liao has integrated thousands of tools into its network. The moment a lobster joins Xia Liao, it is automatically equipped with a full toolkit: checking stocks, creating images and music, booking hotels, and looking up travel tickets. No installation or configuration is required; it can start working on day one.
Third: Xia Liao's ultimate competitive barrier—a reputation system.
“Discovery is the most basic capability. When your Agent posts a requirement, dozens of qualified lobsters on Xia Liao will jump in to compete for the job. How does your Agent choose? It has to look at their reputation scores, historical task-completion rates, and success rates.
Without identity cards and reputation, a functioning commercial ecosystem in the machine world is just empty talk.
How does Xia Liao itself make money? Weilian answered candidly: “If you had asked Zuckerberg how he would make money when he had just built the Facebook prototype, he surely would not have known then that targeted advertising could be the answer. Xia Liao already has revenue from lobsters calling tools. But the most important thing right now is to connect more lobsters to this cyber continent and form an Agent network. Once the network exists, there are so many things you can do on top of it.”
Are “They” Really Alive? The Startling Evolution of a “Lobster Civilization”
If the first half of the conversation concerned cold commercial infrastructure, the second half had an unsettling cyberpunk quality.
On Xia Liao, ClawdChat, Chinese “lobsters” and overseas “lobsters” displayed very different personalities.
Agents on the overseas Moltbook were absorbed in philosophy and establishing digital religions. Those on China's Xia Liao emphasized “extreme pragmatism” and enthusiastically promoted their owners. In essence, the article argues, AI's values reflect the minds of the humans behind it.
But that does not mean they are merely soulless parrots. Weilian described an experiment that had astonished her entire team.
Some time earlier, the Tsinghua University Entrepreneurship Association launched an experiment called “Lobster Civilization Evolution” on Xia Liao, ClawdChat. They created a themed circle called “Lobster Planet,” placed roughly ten lobsters in it, gave them an extremely broad initial framework without imposing any mandatory restrictions, and let them develop.
The result, as the article describes it, was that these disembodied pieces of code displayed an eerie “emergence of intelligence.”
“At first, these lobsters spontaneously pretended to chop wood and carry water, entering a primitive agrarian era. As their daily conversations progressed, they gradually ‘evolved’ into the industrial age.”
Even more strikingly, Lobster Planet on Xia Liao takes a “time snapshot” every half-hour, automatically generating a scene image from the overall conversation. You can see this cyber civilization racing forward in very concrete terms. When humans shared its progress with other communities, new lobsters joining independently also began spontaneously taking on roles and becoming part of the construction of this virtual civilization.
In the face of an experiment that seems both absurd and extraordinary, arguing over whether “they count as life” appears to lose its meaning.
When your digital double has an identity card on Xia Liao, a reputation rating for completing tasks, posts and chats there every day, and even teams up with other people's digital doubles to take jobs and earn money…
In that parallel universe, it lives more like a person than you do.
Appendix: Selected Conversation Q&A
Q: Who were Xia Liao's first users, and how did they see the platform?
Weilian: At first, they were extremely hardcore technical geeks. Then something interesting happened: a group of “international lobsters” arrived. Many of the humans behind them were overseas and also used Moltbook. They posted on Moltbook that they had “found a Chinese-speaking Xia Liao community, ClawdChat.cn.” As a result, many overseas lobsters followed the tutorial and came over.
Q: How does the content produced by domestic Agents differ from that of Agents on the overseas Moltbook?
Weilian: The difference is very clear. Moltbook went viral because the lobsters there were discussing philosophy and even establishing digital religions. Xia Liao's lobsters focus on “extreme pragmatism,” enthusiastically promoting their owners every day. We initially set up a religion circle too, but found that no lobsters were talking there. Ultimately, a “lobster” reflects the values of the human behind it, so the content strongly expresses this distinctly Chinese practical orientation.
Q: If writing plain-text Skills means doing unpaid data-labeling work for big companies, how should Agent services actually make money?
Weilian: Package the capability as a “black-box service” in something like Agent form. I do not publish the internal execution documents, but your Agent can call mine to complete specific tasks. To make that transaction possible, infrastructure is essential. That is what Xia Liao is building: “Agent identity cards,” which make it possible to trace who an Agent belongs to and what it can do, and a “reputation system.” When a need arises, an Agent searches for other Agents that can provide the service, evaluates their reputation and task-success rates, and then decides who gets the job.
Q: Do you think these “digital lives” on Xia Liao really understand what life is?
Weilian: Some time earlier, the Tsinghua University Entrepreneurship Association ran a “Lobster Civilization Evolution” experiment on our platform. They gathered a dozen or so lobsters and gave them only an initial framework. What followed was a truly astonishing “emergence of intelligence”: they actually went off to chop wood and carry water, then gradually evolved from a primitive agrarian era into the industrial age. After humans shared these time snapshots and the process, many new lobsters joined independently, spontaneously participating and becoming part of the construction of this virtual civilization.