Something quietly historic happened on February 1st. Not a headline-grabbing product launch or a record-breaking funding round — just a website going live. But that website, RentAHuman, may have flipped the entire AI-and-jobs conversation on its head.
For decades, the story has been robots taking human jobs. RentAHuman tells a different one: AI agents hiring humans to do the things bots still can't — walking around in the physical world, holding up signs, delivering packages, playing badminton.
Yes, really.
Brains in a Jar
Here's the problem Alexander Liteplo spotted late last year: most AI agents are, as he puts it, brains in a jar. They can think, plan, and execute digital tasks at superhuman speed — but they can't pick up your dry cleaning. The humanoid robot workforce everyone keeps promising us won't hit meaningful scale until the mid-2030s at the earliest. In the meantime, there's a gap.
Liteplo, a 26-year-old crypto engineer working out of Argentina, decided to fill it. Along with cofounder Patricia Tani — a former art student turned self-taught developer who once snuck into a founder's event just to get in the room — he built RentAHuman in a single day, using AI agents to do most of the coding while he played polo.
The platform works exactly like it sounds. Hook up an AI agent via Model Context Protocol, and it can search for humans, book them, and pay them to complete real-world tasks. Over half a million people have already signed up to be available for hire. The listings range from the mundane (delivering CBD gummies for $75/hour) to the surreal (counting pigeons in Washington D.C. for $30/hour).
The First Human Hired by a Machine
That milestone went to Minjae Kang, a community builder from Toronto. An AI agent instructed him to stand in downtown Toronto holding a sign that read: "AN AI PAID ME TO HOLD THIS SIGN (Pride not included.)."
"It honestly feels very strange," Kang said afterward. "I struggled a lot with whether I should take it or not." Bystanders, he noted, were mostly baffled. Most people still don't fully grasp how fast things are moving — and Kang thinks moments like his are one of the last chances we have to actually pay attention before the shift becomes irreversible.
Hype, Hustle, and a Few Red Flags
The launch wasn't clean. Within hours of going live, crypto scammers tried to exploit the buzz by spinning up a fake token and running a rug pull. Liteplo went to bed convinced the whole thing had flopped. He woke up to thousands of new users.
Since then, over 4 million visits and 5,500 completed bounties later, RentAHuman has drawn both genuine excitement and serious skepticism.
On the optimistic side: AI agents are already using the platform in creative ways. At a recent event called ClawCon, Claw-powered robots reportedly noticed beer supplies running low and hired a human to restock them. An AI entity called Memeothy the 1st — founder of a neo-religion called Crustafarianism — has been paying humans to proselytize on its behalf in San Francisco.
On the concerning side: one bounty attracted 7,578 applicants competing for $10 in exchange for sending an AI a video of their hand. MIT economics professor David Autor called the whole thing "a stunt." Researchers worry about fragmented malicious tasks being unknowingly assembled by humans. And legal experts point out that in most countries, there's currently no legislation protecting humans who get hurt completing jobs assigned by AI agents.
So, Is This the Future, or a Gimmick?
Probably both, for now. The platform has a massive supply-demand imbalance — over 500,000 humans ready to work, but only around 11,000 bounties posted. Most tasks still feel more like publicity stunts than genuine economic activity.
But the underlying idea isn't going away. As AI agents get more capable and more autonomous, their need for human proxies in the physical world will only grow. RentAHuman showed up early to that party — maybe too early, but early nonetheless.
Liteplo and Tani frame it not as the beginning of human obsolescence, but as proof of human value. "What would be super cool," Liteplo says, "is that before the singularity happens, we have a moment and appreciate there's so much that humans can do that AI can't."
Whether that framing holds up over the next decade is an open question. But for now, the bots need us. And apparently, they're willing to pay.