Do you have a shirt or a pair of pants that are not quite clean but also not quite stinky enough to put in the hamper yet? You’ve probably just thrown them on that one chair, right? You know, the chair in your bedroom or living room that seems to have spent more of its life holding a pile of clothes than being a usable seat.

This is the seemingly universal shared experience that inventor and YouTube star Simone Giertz wanted to solve. To do that, she built a Laundry Chair, meant to hold laundry and function as a chair at the same time. No more compromises.

“You can pin it to my reluctance for behavioral change,” Giertz says. “This was one of those projects where I was like, I can’t believe this isn’t already a thing.”

After making a video of building the chair more than a year ago, Giertz is turning it into a real product you can buy. It started as a Kickstarter campaign—launched today, and is already funded—though Giertz says the plan was to make the product regardless of whether or not the campaign succeeded. The starting price is $1,100, though there are discounts for backers (the first 50 got free shipping).

“It’s a little bit of a chore thorn in everybody’s side, an eyesore and something you have to deal with,” Giertz says. “I had it on my list of ideas for a long time—something that honored the chair’s job of holding clothes, acknowledged that, and actually tried to do the job properly.”

The Laundry Chair indeed looks like and works as a chair, the key difference being that the arm rests are constructed as a rotatable semicircle. A ball-bearing mechanism lets you smoothly spin the rail around, like a lazy Susan. Turn it around to the front, and you can hang clothes over the bar like you would on a clothesline or drying rack. Spin the rail back around, and the clothes slide neatly behind the chair, out of sight, leaving the seat free. Whether laden with laundry or not, the chair looks quite nice, with a solid hardwood frame and corduroy cotton upholstery.

Giertz has built a following on inventive, wild creations, like a robot that flings soup, or that time she turned a Tesla EV into a pickup truck. Over the years, she shifted her focus from building “shitty robots” to creating genuinely useful projects, like a screwdriver ring or the playfully maddening all-white puzzle with one missing piece.

George Zhang thought OpenClaw could make him rich, even though he didn’t really understand how the viral AI agent software worked. But he saw a video of a Chinese social media influencer demonstrating how it could be deployed to manage stock portfolios and make investment decisions autonomously. Zhang, who works in cross-border ecommerce in the Chinese city of Xiamen, was intrigued enough that he decided to try installing OpenClaw in late February.

Zhang is one of the many people in China who got swept up in the craze over OpenClaw recently. Workshops teaching people how to use the AI agent have popped up in cities across the country, drawing crowds of hundreds. Tech companies are racing to integrate OpenClaw into their platforms, while local governments have announced subsidies for entrepreneurs building products with it. Late last week, images of grandpas and grandmas lining up to install the software went viral across the internet.

After renting a cloud server from Tencent and buying a subscription to the Chinese large language model Kimi, Zhang could start chatting with his OpenClaw agent, or his “lobster,” as many Chinese people call theirs. At first, Zhang tells me, he was impressed by the AI agent as he watched it quickly generate a long market analysis based on the latest breaking news. But a few days in, his lobster started slacking off, and it would generate only a basic outline of market trends instead of a detailed report. He asked OpenClaw to generate something like what it had done on the first day, to which the agent perpetually responded that it was “working on it” before never returning any results.

Zhang’s conclusion was that OpenClaw is not designed for people like him who don’t have any coding skills. “It would tell me I needed to configure the API port. But that’s a technical task, not something I can do unless I had a tutorial walking me through it step-by-step,“ he says. In the end, he gave up on letting his lobster trade stocks, settling instead on asking it to aggregate AI industry news, which he used to build a social media content farm on WeChat.

This week, I checked in with half a dozen users of OpenClaw in China about their experiences with the agent, and a clear picture of division emerged between the adopters who are technologically savvy and those who are not. People who are proficient in AI see OpenClaw as a game changer in productivity, but those with no technical background feel they were promised a miraculously powerful AI product that ultimately didn’t deliver. But by the time the bubble burst, they had already started paying for cloud servers and LLM tokens.

The real driver of the OpenClaw mania in China isn’t everyday users, but rather the Chinese companies that stand to benefit financially from its widespread adoption. Major tech firms like Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, Minimax, Moonshot, and Z.ai all saw the AI productivity FOMO as a rare chance to get normal people to start paying for AI services, and they are reaping the biggest rewards from it.

“A chatbot uses only a few hundred tokens per conversation; a single active OpenClaw instance can consume tens or even hundreds of times more tokens per day,” says Poe Zhao, a tech analyst and founder of the newsletter Hello China Tech. Every new user of OpenClaw is someone who’s paying 24/7 for LLM API calls. “That’s why Tencent engineers were setting up tables outside headquarters to help people install the software for free,” he says.

“I Couldn’t Understand Any of It”

Song Zhuoqun, a college student in China, says she started running into problems with OpenClaw as soon as she tried installing it. Song is a social media intern at an AI startup but has no programming experience, so figuring out how to get OpenClaw running turned out to be difficult. She asked Doubao, ByteDance’s popular AI chatbot, to generate a step-by-step tutorial for her, but it wasn’t much help.

“There were pages full of code, and I couldn’t understand any of it. I just kept asking the AI to generate a response for me, then I’d paste it over, run it, and it would run into an error, so I’d try a new response,” she says. The installation ended up being the most frustrating part of trying out OpenClaw for Song, and she didn’t feel like she learned anything from it.

John Solly, a software engineer and former member of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is the DOGE operative reportedly accused in a whistleblower complaint of telling colleagues that he stored sensitive Social Security Administration (SSA) data on a thumb drive and wanted to share the information with his new employer, multiple sources tell WIRED.

Since October, according to a copy of his résumé, Solly has worked as the chief technology officer for the health IT division of a government contractor called Leidos, which has already received millions in SSA contracts and could receive up to $1.5 billion in contracts with SSA based on a five-year deal it signed in 2023. Solly’s personal website and LinkedIn have been taken offline as of this week.

Responding to a request for comment, Solly, through his legal counsel, denied engaging in any wrongdoing. A spokesperson for Leidos also said the company found no evidence supporting the whistleblower’s claims against Solly.

Solly was one of 12 DOGE team members at SSA, where, according to the résumé on his personal website, he supported “other DOGE engineers on initiatives including Digital SSN, Death Master File cleanup,” and “SSN verification API (EDEN 2.0).” The “death master file” is an SSA database containing millions of Social Security records of deceased people and is maintained so that their identities can’t be used for fraud. An API, or application programming interface, allows different programs to talk to each other, including pulling data and information from each other. In this case, it could allow Social Security data to be accessed by agencies and institutions outside of SSA.

The allegation was revealed in a complaint filed to SSA’s internal watchdog first reported earlier this week by The Washington Post, which did not name Solly or Leidos. According to the Post, the complaint was filed with the SSA’s Office of the Inspector General earlier this year and alleges that the former DOGE employee told coworkers he took copies of the SSA’s Numerical Identification System, or NUMIDENT, as well as the “death master file.” NUMIDENT is a master SSA database containing all information included in a Social Security number application, including full names, birth dates, race, and more personally identifiable information.

In the complaint, according to the Post, a whistleblower alleges that the former DOGE employee sought help transferring a set of data from a thumb drive to a personal computer so he could “sanitize” it before uploading it for use at a private-sector company. The former DOGE employee allegedly said that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were unlawful, the complaint reportedly stated.

Solly “did not share, access, or view any personally identifiable information (PII) maintained by SSA, including SSA’s Death Master File (DMF) and Numerical Identification System (Numident). The allegations made by a supposedly anonymous source are patently false and slanderous. Mr. Solly will take all appropriate steps to clear his good name and stellar reputation,” says Seth Waxman, who is representing Solly. “He is certain that any fair review of the facts and circumstances surrounding these spurious allegations will fully exonerate him.”

Leidos is a major contractor for SSA. Between 2010 and 2018, the company brought in millions of dollars in SSA IT contracts. In 2018, Leidos was awarded contracts potentially worth up to $639 million for IT support services and processing disability claims. In 2023, the company announced that it had been awarded an estimated $1.5 billion IT contract with the agency. As part of DOGE’s blitz into the US government in early 2025, Leidos, like many government contractors, saw some of its contracts cut.