Integrating AI literacy into K-12 education has become a global strategic initiative. Despite an increase in innovative approaches based on hands-on-experiences, there is a lack of theoretical and empirical insights on their effectiveness. To address this, we examine the effect of experiential learning on building AI literacy in K-12 students. We build on experiential learning theory (ELT) to develop hypotheses and conduct a randomized field experiment with 1346 German high school students. Our results indicate that an experiential learning-based AI lesson (1) can enhance AI literacy in terms of higher AI knowledge, higher AI readiness, and lower AI anxiety, (2) might be more effective than a classical AI lesson in building AI literacy in students with low AI affinity, but slightly increases AI anxiety, and (3) is positively evaluated by teachers.