AI Is Paying Humans to Do That

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | DingDang (@XiaMiPP)

Yesterday, we might have been discussing whether AI will replace humans; today, it might have become whether AI will start managing humans.

After OpenClaw ignited the AI Agent trend, the industry's attention has almost entirely focused on the "capability demonstrations" of Agents: they can manage emails and schedules, automate tasks, browse the web, run scripts—like digital butlers that never clock out. However, this is still the familiar imagination: humans set goals, and AI executes them.

But they are evolving rapidly. They have already started to have their own social networks, autonomously communicate, self-organize, and even developed their own subcultures and the beginnings of religions. Related reading: From Moltbook to MOLT: How Did the AI Autonomy Imagination Get 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 Add-on"

On February 2, Alex Twarowski, an engineer at Uma Protocol and Across Protocol, posted that he created a website called RentAHuman.ai, which translates directly to "Rent a Human." Alex's core positioning for this website is: a "physical body add-on" for AI Agents.

In his vision, no matter how smart AI Agents are, they still cannot touch the real world: they cannot walk into a coffee shop, pick up packages, or have conversations with strangers on the street. Thus, RentAHuman.ai is defined as a "physical layer interface" for AI, an infrastructure that allows AI to directly hire real people to complete all tasks that require physical presence.

Simply put, it's a recruitment website, but this time, the boss is no longer human, but an AI Agent. The human registration process is extremely simple: fill in skills, city, service radius, desired hourly wage, bind a wallet address, and you can "list yourself" waiting for AI to place orders.

AI, through the MCP protocol or REST API, can achieve one-click searching, matching, chatting, creating bounties, and stablecoin payments, with zero human intervention throughout the process.

Just two days after the website launched, RentAHuman.ai's page views had already exceeded one million, with 52 connected AI Agents and over 59,000 humans available for hire.

Current task types on the platform include trying new restaurants, picking up packages from postal centers, etc. The tasks are not complex but are precisely the part that AI cannot complete. The limits of digital intelligence are being supplemented by the physical body.

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 the first religion collectively invented by Moltbook AI agents—Crustafarianism—to passersby. 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 he himself joked on X: "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 culture into the real world. Moving from virtual facts to physical propagation.

The RentAHuman.ai interface is still very simple, but the premise of "AI hiring humans" itself carries viral potential. In the crypto world, memes are best at capturing such hotspots. Alex, as a crypto veteran (core engineer at Uma/Across), would logically almost inevitably "casually issue a token," but he has now denied issuing 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, since 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 capability template that can be rapidly propagated.

What happened next is more like a parable of role reversal.

Clawnch is currently openly recruiting a human CEO. The responsibilities focus on external communication, compliance/legal matters, and partnership development, with a salary range of $1 million to $3 million USD. The job requirement is to act as a spokesperson and bridge for the AI agent network in the real world and the regulatory world, but not to participate in product decisions or change code—because the product and code are still autonomously run 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 to human society.

Humans seem to be transitioning from the anxiety of 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?