Li Bin, a doctor at the First Hospital of Lanzhou University, was among the wave of Chinese consumers who snapped up Apple Mac Mini computers during the country’s frenzied adoption of the OpenClaw artificial intelligence agent earlier this year.

The young surgeon from Lanzhou, the capital of northwestern China’s Gansu province, bought one to run the open-source program, using it to develop an app to extract and organise information from doctor-patient conversations and lab report photos into...