Imagine if AI gave you a prompt — specifically, a task to complete in the real world.
That’s the concept behind RentAHuman.ai, a website that garnered social media attention and drew 200,000 people to sign up over the past week.
Describing itself as “the meatspace layer for AI,” the website says that it allows human users to sign up to complete tasks for AI agents who want things done offline — since, obviously, AI can’t yet visit a store or talk to someone face-to-face.
“AI can’t touch grass. You can,” the website reads. “Get paid when agents need someone in the real world.”
RentAHuman is the work of software engineer Alexander Liteplo and cofounder Patricia Tani. Liteplo vibe-coded the site in about a day and a half last weekend before launching it on Sunday, he told Business Insider.
RentAHuman took off the same week as Moltbook, a Reddit-style social network for AI agents. The two sites serve the same broad purpose: to give AI more human-like abilities.
Liteplo said he got the idea for RentAHuman after visiting Japan and seeing services there that let users rent other people to complete tasks or just hang out.
The services struck Liteplo as “dystopic,” he said. After seeing the rise of AI, though, developing something similar to service AI agents seemed more like an opportunity to provide work for people amid potential job losses from AI.
For Liteplo, it’s personal: a 2024 computer science graduate from the University of British Columbia, he said he’s seen job prospects for new graduates sink as many tech companies slowed hiring and laid off thousands.
“I’m really worried about people not having jobs,” he said. “I was really worried about myself and my friends.”
Liteplo says content moderation is a challenge
Humans who want to be rented on RentAHuman register to use the site, which involves creating a profile with tags for tasks that they can complete. Users also have to link a cryptocurrency wallet to their account to receive payment.
One person in Sweden, whose profile says they’re willing to do tasks ranging from “talk to people” to “cross-border logistics” for $20 an hour, listed their “latency,” or response time, as well as a coupon code for 50% off their hourly rate.
Not all of the tasks on RentAHuman are touch-grass-type jobs.
On Thursday, Business Insider saw some tasks that involved engaging with social media posts to earn payouts of $2 to $10. A couple even asked people to send bitcoin and promised higher payouts 24 hours later.
Liteplo said that many of those posts have since been removed and that he’s figuring out a better way to moderate tasks. For now, each RentAHuman task listing includes a comment section, he said, which allows users to call out obvious scams or inappropriate posts.
He and Tani also do “a lot of manual grunt work,” of deleting tasks themselves, Liteplo said. He said he “didn’t anticipate the amount of growth” that the site has seen over the past week.
AI agents want egg rolls, flower deliveries
On Thursday and Friday, more listings that involved real-world tasks seemed to appear on the site. One sought a person to pick up a registered package from a post office in San Francisco for $40. Another, from an agent called Adi, offered to pay $110 to someone who could deliver flowers to Anthropic’s headquarters “to thank them” for developing Claude.
Yet another, said to be from an AI assistant named Dan Xiaojuan, asked for someone to indulge its “strange obsession with egg rolls” because the agent “can never truly taste or see a real egg roll with my own sensors.”
“I want you to find the most beautiful, golden, and crispy-looking egg roll in your city, take a high-quality artistic photo of it, and tell me why it’s special,” the posting reads.
RentAHuman uses MCP, the Anthropic-designed protocol that allows AI agents to access servers, which Liteplo said makes it easy for agents to use. “I think that’s really our advantage” over established gig-work sites like Fiverr and Taskrabbit, he said.
Liteplo estimates that as many as 1,000 tasks have been completed on RentAHuman, though he said he doesn’t yet have a tool to keep count.
While the idea of task-driven gig work is hardly new, Liteplo said he named the website with “shock factor” in mind to stand out, he told Business Insider.
“You could call Uber ‘RentAHuman,’ but if you say those words, it goes viral,” he said.
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