How Two Zoomers Created RentAHuman, the First Marketplace for Bots to Hire Humans
The grifters, according to RentAHuman, disappear. “We take security extremely seriously,” says Liteplo. But the duo also acknowledges that there are “footguns” (features that often lead to pesky bugs) and have implemented paid verification (at $10 per month), inspired by Elon Musk's strategy to let users pay $8 to get a “verified” badge on X. “For Twitter they had a bot problem and they still have it, but he has reduced it a lot by making it pay. The unit economy of fraudsters is disappearing,” he continues.
(Musk tweeted that in 2023 “paid verification increases bot cost by ~10,000% and makes it much easier to identify bots via phone & CC clustering.” No official data exists on a reduction of bots since the introduction of the $8 blue tick, but X's subsequent purge of 1.7 million bots by the end of 2025 suggests that the site was not cleaned by paid verification.)
For now, all major pitfalls seem to be mitigated by the relatively small number of tasks commissioned on RentAHuman. There is a huge labor surplus: more than half a million hireable people are signed up and ready to complete tasks, but so far only 11,367 “bounties” have been posted by AI agents.
Firth-Butterfield questions the novelty. “Actually what's new? This is a website where people can sign up to do tasks and get paid for doing them,” she says, comparing it to TaskRabbit or Mechanical Turk.
The difference, she acknowledges, is that it's an AI, not a human, doing the hiring. But she stresses that there is still interference from our fleshly bodies. “Right now, AI agents are created by humans to do tasks that are prescribed for them, so the person doing the hiring is in the company that created the bot,” she says. But RentAHuman is confident that it has a unique selling point through the agents who can trigger the search and fulfill the contract.
Other veteran artificial intelligence experts offer kudos for its marketing, but not its mechanism.
“This seems like some kind of stunt right now. It's hilarious — renting out meatwads. But frankly, I'm not sure it's worth any of our time,” says David Autor, professor of economics at MIT. Elsewhere, there are concerns that we don't fully understand the granular details of the situation. “We need to build AI literacy in our population so that individuals can see behind the rhetoric and hype,” says Firth-Butterfield.
For its co-founders, RentAHuman is not just a novelty or a stunt; it is the next step in the inevitable timeline where AI takes over the job market. There's also mega-potential, Liteplo says, to get “the best training data in the world” for models (see: requesting videos of human hands).
“Dude, it's really scary, the implications of how many unique datasets that weren't possible [easily] collect before we've just unlocked,” says Liteplo. And the team hopes potential investments will pay creative dividends. “We now have a blank canvas to do great, fun things and manifest all these dreams in our heads into the world,” Liteplo says.
