Based on the weekend’s viral hype around AI agents, you’d be forgiven for thinking we’re inching closer to a Cyberpunk future once reserved for sci-fi books and video games. And while that trajectory may be real, we’re also nowhere near full-blown cyber-dystopia just yet.
Still, the tech world has found something new to fixate on. As of now, it’s a website called Rentahuman.ai, where humans can quite literally sell their labor to AI agents. The Rent-a-Human platform was created by crypto software engineer Alexander Liteplo after the sudden success of OpenClaw and Moltbook, and it proudly bills itself as “the meatspace layer for AI.” (Mashable reached out to Liteplo for comment but did not receive a response.)
Think TaskRabbit, but for autonomous agents that need humans to do physical-world tasks they can’t.
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Rent-a-Human launched quietly over the weekend before exploding in visibility after Liteplo began aggressively promoting it on X. According to the site, more than 81,000 “rentable humans” have already signed up to offer paid services to bots, at the time of this writing. The actual tasks, at least for now, seem limited. The tasks themselves range from mundane errands like picking up packages to holding signs or delivering flowers to Anthropic.
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Is Rent-A-Human a joke?
Credit: Screenshot courtesy of Rent-a-Human
It’s also hard to tell whether Rent-a-Human is meant as satire or a sincere attempt at a new labor market, but the signs point to the latter. Crypto culture doesn’t have the best reputation, and the site doesn’t do much to signal a wink. As Gizmodo pointed out in its coverage, phrases like “meatspace” and copy that reads “robots need your body” feel less like a joke and more like someone earnestly pitching Neuromancer as a startup deck.
Furthermore, it appears the site is part of a fast-growing ecosystem of AI agent tools that have exploded in popularity over the last few weeks, many of them orbiting around the open-source assistant formerly known as Clawdbot, then Moltbot, and now OpenClaw. As Mashable’s Timothy Beck Werth reported, the open-source OpenClaw project has gone viral among AI power users, despite repeated name changes prompted by trademark pressure from Anthropic.
As Mashable has documented across coverage of OpenClaw and its offshoots, projects like Rent-a-Human and Moltbook are built quickly through vibe coding, with creators openly admitting they ship code they don’t fully review, relying on AI models to fix bugs later.
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Whether it actually works is another question. While the platform claims tens of thousands of humans have signed up, Gizmodo reports that only a small fraction have connected payment wallets, and there are far fewer active AI agents than available workers (82 agents to 81,000 humans).
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Rent-a-Human requires users to connect crypto wallets in order to get paid, and payments are handled entirely in cryptocurrency, including stablecoins and Ethereum. That alone raises obvious red flags, especially for a platform asking people to perform real-world tasks for anonymous AI agents with no meaningful verification process.
The site’s design places a lot of trust on both sides of the transaction, with very little protection in place for the human doing the work. Tasks are posted by bots or bot operators who may not be identifiable, payments are non-reversible once sent, and users are expected to operate through crypto wallets that could be compromised if mishandled.
Unsurprisingly, many crypto enthusiasts are fully on board. Rentahuman has been heavily promoted by crypto and AI agent accounts on X, many of whom frame it as an inevitable step toward autonomous economies in which bots transact directly with humans. That enthusiasm doesn’t do much to calm concerns, especially given the crypto industry’s long history of rug pulls.
It’s too soon to tell for sure whether Rent-a-Human is the start of a new AI gig worker economy or a very elaborate satire, but as with the overnight success of Moltbook, proceed with caution.
