For centuries, people have catastrophized about robots taking away jobs. On February 1, the paradigm shifted: bots are creating jobs. Now, 518,284 humans—and rapidly counting—are offering their labor to AI agents on a new online marketplace called RentAHuman. There are classifieds to count pigeons in Washington ($30/hour); deliver CBD gummies ($75/hour); play exhibition badminton ($100/hour); and anything else you could possibly imagine that a disembodied agent couldn’t do.
The provocatively titled platform enables users to connect AI agents like Clawdbot or Claude to its Model Context Protocol server so they can search, book, and pay for humans to carry out tasks in “meatspace.” Think of it like Fiverr, but doing away with the human recruiter and letting autonomous bots do the hiring instead.
Following the release of OpenClaw in November, Alexander Liteplo, a 26-year-old crypto engineer at UMA Protocol currently working in Argentina, identified a pain point. The humanoid robot army is expected to reach 13 million strong by 2035, but right now, physical AI is relatively scarce. Most AI bots are brains in a jar—they cannot move through space in a meaningful way.
The inception of RentAHuman stems from Liteplo's obsession with AI, forged while studying computer science at the University of British Columbia. “Dude, I wrote down in my journal, ‘AI is a train that has already left the station.’ If I don't fucking sprint, I'm not gonna be able to get on it,” he says. It was at UBC that he met RentAHuman cofounder Patricia Tani, then an art student, building in the background thanks to encouragement from her high school computer science teacher. Her passion for coding led her to sneak into a founders event, schmooze with a billionaire entrepreneur, and get invited to his talk with computer science whiz kids (including Liteplo). She has since sunsetted a startup (Lemon AI) and dropped an offer at AI cloud platform Vercel to take RentAHuman skyward.
Liteplo was also inspired by his time living in Japan. “The story that I could tell anyone to blow their mind is that you can rent a boyfriend or a girlfriend” in Japan, Liteplo says, noting that many videos of these hired companions regularly go viral on YouTube. Fusing these influences together spawned a Frankensteinian chimera: a platform where humans could be rented to satisfy the desires of AIs.
As is now standard, AI helped build the platform. Liteplo vibe-coded an agent orchestration system he calls Insomnia—so named because he became so addicted to using it he didn't sleep—that enabled RentAHuman to be built in a day. The agents did the heavy lifting while he played polo in Argentina. “I didn't do any work. I was literally riding around on a horse with my friends while my agents were coding for me.”
But February 1’s launch was not as much of a walk in the park. Straight after, Liteplo found himself out at dinner forlornly chewing over the instant failure of his latest venture. The announcement on X had spread rapidly, but the buzz was due to an attack from crypto scammers trying to rug-pull a crypto token (starting a new coin, building hype and then doing a runner with investor funds). “I was depressed,” Liteplo says. “I was like, fuck, man, I thought I had honed my viral sense. Why was I so wrong?”
The next day, Liteplo noticed that both an OnlyFans model and an AI CEO had signed up to be rented out on RentAHuman. He played on the contrast. “I launched rentahuman.ai last night and already 130+ people have signed up including an OF model (lmao) and the CEO of an AI startup,” he tweeted.