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Written by | Bei What
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Foreword

Who would have thought that 360, which claims to have been deeply engaged in cybersecurity for 20 years and makes its living from security, would actually stumble in its most familiar field—and in the most absurd and inexplicable way possible.

360's boss Zhou Hongyi seized this opportunity, personally took center stage, and aggressively promoted his company's new AI product "Security Lobster." He intended to take a shortcut by leveraging his 20-year advantage in the security business, but the product crashed completely right after launch, directly causing the company's market value to evaporate by 3.6 billion, a textbook example of losing both wife and soldiers.

This mistake—so low-level and absurd—not only dealt a harsh blow to Zhou Hongyi's face, but also left hundreds of millions of users collectively questioning: Has 360's much-touted cybersecurity prowess over the years been genuinely impressive, or is it purely marketing hype?

How hard is Zhou Hongyi pushing?

Recently, AI agents (colloquially called "raising shrimp") have become the hot commodity in tech circles. In plain terms, they're AI assistants that can help people handle office work, write code, and produce reports. Whether ordinary people use them to save time or enterprises use them to improve efficiency, they're indispensable.

Seeing that Tencent and Baidu are pushing free installations and aggressively seizing the market, 360, which originated from security, can no longer sit still. After all, falling behind by one step in the AI race could mean being completely left in the dust.

As 360's boss, Zhou Hongyi has placed tremendous hopes on the "raising shrimp" track, even stating bluntly in public interviews that "not developing raising shrimp is the biggest security risk."