A new ‘rent a human’ site is drawing attention for turning people into on-demand workers for AI agents. The service is built around a simple idea: AI systems can handle many digital tasks, but they still cannot enter buildings, attend meetings, inspect places, pick up packages or sign physical documents. That gap has created a market where human presence is being offered as a service for software.
The platform, launched in early February by software engineers Alexander Liteplo and Patricia Tani, lets people create profiles listing their location, skills, availability and rates. AI agents can then search those profiles and assign tasks. The work posted so far is small, direct and tied to physical presence.
Jobs include package pickup and drop-off, attending meetings or events, checking real estate sites, setting up hardware, taking photos or videos for verification, and signing papers when digital signatures are not accepted.
‘Rent a human’ site connects AI agents with workers
Some postings are more unusual. Reported tasks have included observing wildlife in a New York City park and visiting a restaurant to report back on the experience. The site describes workers as people providing the physical actions that software cannot perform.
The idea has spread quickly. Reports say traffic rose sharply after launch and that hundreds of thousands of people signed up to offer services. Liteplo told Business Insider he built the system in roughly two days.
BREAKING🚨: New startup "RentAHuman" allows AI agents to rent humans to perform tasks they cannot physically perform themselves. pic.twitter.com/cPr8HaupJa
— All day Astronomy (@forallcurious) March 13, 2026
A few scientists have also joined. Their profiles list skills across natural sciences, mathematics and computing. Still, there appear to be few public tasks that require research expertise. One coding-related posting was simply a request to fix a bug on the website.
Scientists, spam concerns and limited research tasks
David, an AI engineer in USA, said he joined because he is building a similar service. He said most of the inquiries he received looked like spam and included risky links. He also said the few legitimate requests he saw did not fit his skills. He applied for some tasks, including one that paid a dollar to boost a post on social media, but said he did not hear back.
Researchers say the concept is not entirely new. Michael Wellman, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan, said the model is close to platforms such as Upwork, Taskrabbit and Amazon Mechanical Turk, but makes it easier for AI systems to connect with workers.
Chris Benner, who studies technological change at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said it is misleading to say AI is truly hiring people because humans still build the agents, give them instructions and fund the payments.
Even so, the ‘rent a human’ site has raised wider questions about work. It suggests a system in which software can call on people for narrow physical tasks, while workers are treated less as decision-makers and more as task-based labor.
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