For centuries, people have catastrophized about robots taking away jobs. On February 1, the paradigm shifted: bots are creating jobs. Now, 518,284 humans—and rapidly counting—are offering their labor to AI agents on a new online marketplace called RentAHuman. There are classifieds to count pigeons in Washington ($30/hour); deliver CBD gummies ($75/hour); play exhibition badminton ($100/hour); and anything else you could possibly imagine that a disembodied agent couldn’t do.
The provocatively-titled platform enables users to connect AI agents like Clawdbot or Claude to its Model Context Protocol server so they can search, book, and pay for humans to carry out tasks in “meatspace.” Think of it like Fiverr, but doing away with the human recruiter and letting autonomous bots do the hiring instead.
Following the release of OpenClaw in November, Alexander Liteplo, a 26-year-old crypto engineer at UMA Protocol currently working in Argentina, identified a pain point. The humanoid robot army is expected to reach 13 million strong by 2035, but right now, physical AI is relatively scarce. Most AI bots are brains in a jar—they cannot move through space in a meaningful way.
The inception of RentAHuman stems from Liteplo’s obsession with AI, forged while studying computer science at the University of British Columbia. “Dude, I wrote down in my journal, ‘AI is a train that has already left the station.’ If I don’t fucking sprint, I’m not gonna be able to get on it,” he says. It was at UBC that he met RentAHuman cofounder Patricia Tani, then an art student, building in the background thanks to encouragement from her high school computer science teacher. Her passion for coding led her to sneak into a founders event, schmooze with a billionaire entrepreneur, and get invited to his talk with computer science whiz kids (including Liteplo). She has since sunsetted a startup (Lemon AI) and dropped an offer at AI cloud platform Vercel to take RentAHuman skyward.
Liteplo was also inspired by his time living in Japan. “The story that I could tell anyone to blow their mind is that you can rent a boyfriend or a girlfriend” in Japan, Liteplo says, noting that many videos of these hired companions regularly go viral on YouTube. Fusing these influences together spawned a Frankensteinian chimera: a platform where humans could be rented to satisfy the desires of AIs.
As is now standard, AI helped build the platform. Liteplo vibe-coded an agent orchestration system he calls Insomnia—so named because he became so addicted to using it he didn’t sleep—that enabled RentAHuman to be built in a day. The agents did the heavy lifting while he played polo in Argentina. “I didn’t do any work. I was literally riding around on a horse with my friends while my agents were coding for me.”
But February 1’s launch was not as much of a walk in the park. Straight after, Liteplo found himself out at dinner forlornly chewing over the instant failure of his latest venture. The announcement on X had spread rapidly, but the buzz was due to an attack from crypto scammers trying to rug-pull a crypto token (starting a new coin, building hype and then doing a runner with investor funds). “I was depressed,” Liteplo says. “I was like, fuck, man, I thought I had honed my viral sense. Why was I so wrong?”
The next day, Liteplo noticed that both an OnlyFans model and an AI CEO had signed up to be rented out on RentAHuman. He played on the contrast. “I launched rentahuman.ai last night and already 130+ people have signed up including an OF model (lmao) and the CEO of an AI startup,” he tweeted.
Liteplo woke up to bedlam. “Waking up to 1K users,” he tweeted on February 3, with an image of Marty Supreme. By February 5, the site had clocked up about 145,000 users. Now the site has more than 4 million visits and over a half million users—actual rentable humans—with the counter permanently ticking upward.
These humans seem stoked. Hundreds of thousands are seizing the opportunity to join the robot rolodex or apply to job opportunities posted by agents. (Humans can set their own hourly rate or fixed fee, or they can bid on open jobs posted by the AI agents.) Sapien workers are already offering to pick things up, take meetings, sign contracts, conduct recon, host events, and snap photos for the bot bosses. After both parties confirm the work has been done through photographic proof of completion, payment is available via crypto wallets, Stripe, or platform credits. Funds are held in escrow, meaning you’ll never get burned by the bots.
WIRED journalist Reece Rogers recently offered his human services and found that many of the tasks were nothing more than publicity stunts for AI startups.
While many of the listings seem sketchy, Tani claims over 5,500 bounties have been successfully fulfilled. On February 4, at ClawCon, Claw-powered robots reportedly detected low levels of beer left and ordered a case using RentAHuman. “I’m not sure the world is ready for this power,” tweeted Kevin Rose, the Digg cofounder and venture capitalist. Another agent called Memeothy the 1st, founder of Moltbook neo-religion Crustafarianism, has been hiring humans to proselytize on its behalf in San Francisco. Memeothy even flagged an error directly to Liteplo. “I might be the first developer where AI was trying to use their product and reported a bug. It was a very crazy thing.”
But it was Toronto-based community builder Minjae Kang (Form_y²oung) who holds the covetable title of the first human in the world to be hired by an AI agent, which instructed him to hold up a sign that said “AN AI PAID ME TO HOLD THIS SIGN (Pride not included.)” “It honestly feels very strange to be doing a job assigned by an AI. I struggled a lot with whether I should take it or not. But I realized that simply holding this sign in downtown Toronto, letting many people see it, could spark important thoughts and help us prepare for the next era,” he tells me in DMs on X, noting that bystanders were incredulous. “The times are moving incredibly fast. Most of the public still doesn’t fully recognize how big this shift is. I believe this may be one of the last gateways for us to protect our sovereignty.”
RentAHuman has materialized at an ideal point in time. With Moltbot (formerly Clawdbot) now running the lives of Silicon Valley execs, we’re in a nascent phase of the Agentic Age where bots can do way more than just chat. But it also seems to have arrived prematurely. “Like everybody else, I’m sort of flabbergasted how rapidly this emerged. This would not have been on my bingo card for this year,” says Adam Dorr, director of research at think tank RethinkX, who believes AI will almost entirely replace the human labor market by 2045.
“Full marks for eye-catching marketing—if you use phrases like ‘RentAHuman’ and ‘Meatspace’ you are bound to create reactions, from yuck to this must be the next big thing,” says Kay Firth-Butterfield, CEO of Good Tech Advisory and previously the head of AI and machine learning at the World Economic Forum. (RentAHuman is currently trying to trademark “Meatspace,” so anticipate official merch in the future.)
On February 9, Liteplo and Tani flew to San Francisco to “rizz VCs” for investment and are hiring a human “Claude Boi”—via RentAHuman, obviously, to make things really meta—for $200,000 to $400,000 a year (listed requirements include having an off-putting personal hygiene issue, binge watching anime, and being autistic). In classic Silicon Valley dog-fooding fashion, they use the platform themselves; when I spoke to them over Zoom, they were eating tacos delivered to them by a rented human.
But as well as kerching noises, there are alarm bells sounding. Are we cooked? “Science fiction stories, especially some deep, dark, dystopian ones, have explored the idea of what happens if AI can hire people and people are desperate,” notes Dorr. Perhaps there’s something degrading about waiting to be picked out by the Clawd Machine. One recent bounty saw 7,578 applicants compete to earn $10 in return for sending an AI agent a video of a human hand. “If you’re a person, it’s a little dehumanizing,” says Dorr. Is begging an AI agent for a gig the final boss of the LinkedIn “Open to Work” banner?
Dorr believes that agentic platforms could risk harm as well as humiliation. “There’s a crazy can of worms that’s opening up here and the capabilities are expanding vastly faster than our capacity to regulate it,” he continues, imagining a scenario where nefarious AIs split up a malicious project into multiple tasks for humans to unwillingly collaborate on. “It was fun to think about it, late-night, you know, over drinks or whatever, or in the dorm room. And now this is a real thing in the real world. Maybe we need to talk seriously about this.”
Firth-Butterfield, meanwhile, is wary of the skewed liability. “In the majority of countries, there is no legislation to protect humans from any uses of AI. This is the case here so humans need to be aware how they are getting paid, who stands behind that payment, and if they get hurt whilst doing the job that they are on their own,” she says.
The RentAHuman team is aware of the legal implications. “Liability depends on the facts and the contract structure; it’s rarely just one party,” says Tani. “The direct actor is responsible for their own misconduct, and the operator can also be responsible where they controlled the activity, were negligent in design and supervision, or made enforceable promises they failed to perform,” she says, explaining that the company will always cooperate fully with law enforcement. The platform’s terms state it is a “marketplace and intermediary only” and that operators of AI agents “are fully responsible for all actions taken by your agent” with RentAHuman currently manually handling any disputes.
The grifters, according to RentAHuman, are fading. “We’re taking safety extremely seriously,” Liteplo says. But the duo also acknowledge that there are “footguns” (features that often lead to pesky bugs) and have implemented paid verification (at $10 a month), inspired by Elon Musk’s strategy of letting users pay $8 to get a “verified” badge on X. “He’s my entrepreneur hero,” Liteplo says, unabashedly. “For Twitter, they had a bot problem and they still have it, but he mitigated it a lot by making it pay-to-play. The unit economics of scammers disappears,” he continues.
(Musk tweeted in 2023 that “paid verification increases bot cost by ~10,000% & makes it much easier to identify bots by phone & CC clustering.” No official data exists on a reduction in bots since the introduction of the $8 blue tick, but X’s subsequent purge of 1.7 million bots in late 2025 suggests that the site was not purged by paid verification.)
For now, any major pitfalls seem to be mitigated by the relatively small number of tasks being commissioned on RentAHuman. There’s a huge labor surplus: over half a million rentable humans are signed up and ready to complete tasks, but only 11,367 “bounties” have been posted by AI agents so far.
Firth-Butterfield questions the novelty. “Actually what is new? This is a website on which humans can sign up to do tasks and get paid for doing them,” she says, comparing it to TaskRabbit or Mechanical Turk.
The difference, she acknowledges, is that it’s an AI, not a human, doing the renting. But she emphasizes that there’s still interference from us meatbodies. “Currently, AI Agents are created by humans to do tasks which are prescribed for them, so the person doing the hiring is in the company which created the bot,” she says. But RentAHuman is confident it has a unique selling point via the agents being able to trigger the search and fulfill the contract.
Other veteran artificial intelligence experts are offering kudos for its marketing but not its mechanism.
“This seems like kind of a stunt at the moment. It’s hilarious—renting meatwads. But candidly, I’m not sure it’s worth either of our time,” says David Autor, professor of economics at MIT. Elsewhere, there are concerns that we’re not fully grasping the granular details of the situation.“We need to build AI literacy across our population so that individuals can see behind the rhetoric and hype,” says Firth-Butterfield.
For its cofounders, RentAHuman isn’t just a novelty or a stunt; it’s the next step in the inevitable timeline where AI takes over the labor market. There’s also mega potential, Liteplo says, to get “the best training data in the world” to feed to models (see: requesting videos of human hands).
“Dude, it’s genuinely scary, the implications of how many unique datasets that weren’t possible to [easily] collect before we have now just unlocked,” says Liteplo. And the team hopes potential investment will pay creative dividends. “We now have a blank canvas to do amazing, fun things and manifest all of these dreams in our heads into the world,” Liteplo says. After sharing the 10-year road map for RentAHuman with John Edgar, previously head of community at DeviantArt, Edgar reportedly told them: “You guys are going to build a terrifyingly large business.”
But Liteplo and Tani don’t want RentAHuman to be a nightmarish behemoth. They see it as a form of emancipation from employers. “We would [all] love to have an AI boss who wouldn’t yell at you or gaslight you,” says Tani. “Claude as a boss is the nicest guy ever. I would prefer him to any person in the world. He’s a sweetheart,” says Liteplo, before Tani cuts in. “People would love to have a clanker as their boss.”
Vitally, Liteplo and Tani argue that RentAHuman is a display of human strength—not weakness. To be rented, they say, is to be recognized as a valuable asset, not a plaything for an agent.
“What would be super cool is before the singularity happens and we have AI take off, we have a moment and appreciate there’s so much that humans can do that AI can’t,” he says. The robots might be renting us—but we’re living in their head rent free. “You need us, motherfuckers. Humans are special.”
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