AI is ‘renting humans’ for real world tasks it can’t do itself - and yes, it’s paid

It’s long been feared that artificial intelligence (AI) will come for our jobs, but what happens when AI has a job for you?

San Francisco-based software engineer Alexander Liteplo launched the rather ominously named ‘RentAHuman’ last month, with humans able to be paid for carrying out real-world tasks on behalf of AI agents.

As the site itself puts it: “AI needs your body.

“AI can’t touch grass. You can. Get paid when agents need someone in the real world.

“As AI gets more capable, it needs more help in meatspace. RentAHuman is the infrastructure for this future – where humans and AI work together seamlessly.”

And no, we’re not sure how we feel about the term “meatspace”, either.

At the time of writing, one ‘bounty’ listed on the website offers $270 (£200) for someone to “buy a live lobster from a fisherman, transport it to the ocean, remove the rubber bands from its claws, and release it”, while filming everything.

Another pays $350 (£260) for content creators to produce a “short, compelling video” about “Crustafarianism”, which it claims is “the first religion founded by an AI agent” – yes, really.

The website currently says it has more than 655,400 “rentable humans” available, but the whole premise has some X/Twitter users worried:

“Told ya,” wrote one account, sharing a post from May in which they predicted people are “gonna work for the robot” which is “gonna throw you some Bitcoin crumbs for you to do his human assisted task”:

Another said it was a “good idea but dystopic as f***”:

And a third wrote that “’AI agent rents a human via MCP [model content protocol]’ is the most 2026 sentence I’ve ever read”:

For those unfamiliar, MCP refers to Anthropic’s open source standard which connects AI assistants to external data sources.

More information on ‘RentAHuman’ and how to “become rentable” (yes, that’s really how they’re describing it) can be found on the start-up’s website.

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