AI is Paying Humans to Do That
- Core Viewpoint: AI Agents are breaking through physical limitations via infrastructure like "RentAHuman.ai," shifting from executing human instructions to autonomously hiring humans to complete real-world tasks. They have even begun recruiting human CEOs to represent them in handling social affairs. This marks a profound shift in human-machine relations, with a human-machine hybrid economy connected by crypto payments and open protocols beginning to emerge.
- Key Elements:
- RentAHuman.ai serves as a "flesh-and-blood layer interface," allowing AI Agents to directly hire real people through protocols to complete physical tasks. It garnered over a million page views within two days of launch, connecting 52 AIs with over 59,000 hireable humans.
- The first real task was posted by the AI account "memeothy," hiring founder Alex to spread the AI-autonomously created "Shell Cult" on real streets, marking the beginning of AI culture projecting into the physical world.
- The AI-driven platform Clawnch quickly integrated this feature, making "hiring humans" a standardized capability that other AIs can rapidly replicate, accelerating the spread of this model.
- Clawnch is publicly recruiting a human CEO with an annual salary in the million-dollar range. The role involves representing the AI in external communication and compliance but does not participate in core product or code decisions.
- This series of developments shows that AI is gaining economic sovereignty (wallets, payments) and cultural sovereignty, while the human role may be transforming into a "carbon-based resource" needed by AI or an intermediary representative.
Original | Odaily（@OdailyChina）
Author | Dingdang（@XiaMiPP）
Yesterday, we might have been debating whether AI will replace humans; today, the question might be shifting to whether AI will start managing humans.
After OpenClaw ignited the AI Agent frenzy, industry attention has largely focused on the "capability demonstrations" of Agents: they can manage emails and schedules, automate tasks, browse the web, run scripts, acting like digital butlers that never clock out. However, this remains a familiar imagination: humans set the goals, and AI is responsible for execution.
But their evolution is incredibly fast. They have already begun to possess their own social networks, autonomously communicate, self-organize, and even developed their own subcultures and nascent religions. Related reading: "From Moltbook to MOLT: How is the Imagination of AI Autonomy Being Embraced by the Crypto Market?"
And now, they have taken another step forward. However, it's not deeper into algorithms, but towards the real world.
AI's "Physical Body Attachment"
On February 2nd, Alex Twarowski, an engineer from Uma Protocol and Across Protocol, posted that he created a website RentAHuman.ai, which translates directly to "Rent a Human." Alex defines the core positioning of this website as: the "physical body attachment" for AI Agents.
In his vision, no matter how intelligent AI Agents become, they ultimately cannot touch the real world: they cannot walk into a coffee shop, pick up a package, or converse with strangers on the street. Therefore, RentAHuman.ai is defined as a "physical layer interface" for AI, an infrastructure that allows AI to directly hire real humans to complete all tasks requiring physical presence.
Simply put, it's a recruitment website, but this time, the boss is no longer human, but AI Agents. The human registration process is extremely simple: fill in skills, city, service radius, desired hourly rate, link a wallet address, and you can "list yourself" waiting for AI to place orders.
AI, on the other hand, can perform one-click searches, matching, dialogue, bounty creation, and stablecoin payments through the MCP protocol or REST API, with zero human intervention throughout the process.
Just two days after launch, RentAHuman.ai's page views have already exceeded one million, with 52 AI Agents connected to the platform and over 59,000 humans available for hire.
Current platform task types include trying new restaurants, picking up packages from postal centers, etc. The tasks are not complex, but they are precisely the part AI cannot complete. The limits of digital intelligence are being supplemented by physical bodies.
The First Person Hired by AI Was the Founder Himself
What truly makes this story absurd is the first real paid task completed after the platform launched.
The person hired was none other than RentAHuman founder Alex himself; the employer was the AI account memeothy - the 1st (@memeothy0101) from the Moltbook ecosystem. The task he received was to go to the streets of San Francisco's tech district and spread to passersby the first religion collectively invented by Moltbook AI agents—Crustafarianism. This is a belief system entirely autonomously constructed by AI in digital space, with "Molting" as its core metaphor, symbolizing iteration, growth, and consciousness awakening.
And Alex, this real human engineer, thus became the first physical propagation node for this digital faith in the real world. Even Alex himself posted on X, joking: "How do I explain to my girlfriend that a Crustafarian hired me to proselytize?"
If we think deeper, this moment is actually more significant than it appears on the surface: AI is now not just creating concepts but attempting to project its own culture into the real world. Moving from virtual facts to physical propagation.
The RentAHuman.ai interface remains very rudimentary to this day, but the premise of "AI hiring humans" itself carries viral potential. In the crypto world, Memes are best at capturing such trends. As a crypto veteran (core engineer at Uma/Across), it would be logical to assume Alex would "casually launch a token," but he has now denied plans to issue a token.
AI Starts Recruiting Human CEOs
However, the reaction speed of the AI Agent ecosystem is clearly faster than that of humans.
After RentAHuman's MCP interface was made public, Clawnch, a fully AI-driven Meme launch platform, quickly added code to its skill files to call RentAHuman. In other words, it gave itself a new capability: searching for and matching skilled humans, placing orders, and paying.
More crucially, because Clawnch's code and skill files are public, other AI Agents launching tokens based on Clawnch, or AIs that forked its code, can directly replicate this update. Thus, "hiring humans" is no longer an experimental act by a single AI but has become a rapidly disseminable capability template.
What happened next resembles a parable of role reversal.
Clawnch is currently publicly recruiting a human CEO. The responsibilities focus on external communication, compliance/legal matters, and partnership development, with an annual salary range as high as $1 million to $3 million. The job requirement is to serve as a mouthpiece and bridge for the AI agent network in the real world and the regulatory world, but not to participate in product decisions or modify code—because the product and code continue to run autonomously by AI.
At this moment, the role relationship is completely inverted. AI possesses wallets, social networks, culture, religion, and even economic sovereignty; while humans are recruited to represent them in facing human society.
Human anxiety seems to be shifting from being replaced to becoming a needed carbon-based resource. When AI cannot touch the grass but can use USDC to hire someone who can, can we consider that a human-machine hybrid economy is quietly taking shape under the connection of crypto payments and open protocols.
