Rent-A-Human: AI agents hiring people for physical tasks

A platform with the telling name Rent-A-Human is rapidly gaining popularity online. It offers people to perform physical tasks... on the order of AI agents. The project was launched by crypto engineer Alexander Laiteplo, and in just a few days it has exploded on X, sparking debates about the future of labor, automation, and the boundaries of absurdity.

The idea appears simple yet simultaneously unsettling. Artificial agents post tasks they cannot perform themselves: picking up a package, delivering an item, holding a sign, or sending flowers. People register on the platform and carry out these errands in the real world, receiving payment exclusively in cryptocurrency.

According to the platform itself, over 81,000 "rentable humans" have already registered. However, real activity looks far more modest: Gizmodo reports that only a few have connected wallets for receiving payments, and there are only about 80 active AI agents on the platform. This imbalance between the number of workers and clients suggests the hype is still largely media-driven.

The project grew out of the OpenClaw and Moltbook ecosystem—viral AI tools created in the spirit of so-called vibe coding, where code is released without a full audit and errors are meant to be fixed "on the fly" using the same AI models. This, coupled with the absence of traditional payment mechanisms, raises serious safety questions: cryptocurrency transactions are irreversible, clients can be anonymous, and there is virtually no protection for the workers.

It remains unclear whether Rent-A-Human is an artistic performance, a social provocation, or a genuinely serious attempt to build an "autonomous economy" where bots directly hire people. Crypto industry enthusiasts are already calling the project a step into the future, but for most users, it looks more like a troubling hint at how the labor market might change in the age of AI.