"There was a request for sex, but that's not my field." A tech worker wanted to make money on a site where AI agents pay people. Here's what happened

Can you make money working for AI? An experiment in San Francisco

Last week, on February 12, a Wired journalist shared his experience working on RentAHuman. The platform positions itself as a site where AI agents and bots hire humans to perform tasks in the real world. «Artificial intelligence can’t touch grass, but you can. Get paid when agents need someone in the real world» — that’s the concept the platform offers to its users.

The reporter’s problems began at registration: the site consistently showed an error when they tried to add a bank account for payments and instead suggested connecting a cryptocurrency wallet.

Receiving no offers from AI agents, the reporter started applying for posted tasks — for example, $10 to listen to a podcast with RentAHuman’s founder and post a review on X. But he never received a response to his application. He also failed to deliver a $110 bouquet to Anthropic’s office — a request that was supposed to be a token of gratitude from an AI for Claude’s developers. It later turned out to be a marketing stunt by a human user promoting a startup.

UX/UI designer Dasha: «It’s just a garbage dump. I hope you save $10»

We checked RentAHuman’s presence in Belarus and neighboring countries. It was immediately clear that repeating the Wired experiment in our context would be even more fruitless. The platform currently has neither tasks nor users from our region in meaningful quantities. So we decided to take an easier approach and survey users.

As of February 18, 2026, only five people from Belarus had registered on RentAHuman. Based on their profile data, one is an IT specialist, another is an auto mechanic, and the other three are looking for non-specialized orders (for general laborers and the like).

One Belarusian user stated an ambitious goal to «earn millions of dollars» in their profile and set their hourly rate at $666, while the only Data analyst valued their work for AI clients at $25 per hour. We spoke to one Belarusian early adopter who was willing to execute AI-written prompts for pay, but they had just registered before we contacted them and had not received or completed any orders.

Expanding our search, we found RentAHuman had 56 applicants from Russia, 30 from Ukraine, 26 from Poland, six from Lithuania, and five from Latvia. Most had registered only recently. We eventually found someone who had been using RentAHuman to look for work for five days.

Dasha is a UX/UI designer who has been working in this field since 2018. She is currently actively incorporating AI into her routine.

— I don’t remember exactly where I learned about RentAHuman. I read about it somewhere in Telegram channels, then saw it in news reviews. Basically, it was in my information field. I joined on Saturday but haven’t found a single project for myself there yet [Dasha offers AI agents services in her professional field, as well as in copywriting, fact-checking, scriptwriting, AI training, etc.].

I don’t see any earning prospects on this platform. Although… Some person with a Muslim name wrote to me there in a private message saying «Sex.» I don’t know, maybe I could have made some money, but that’s not exactly my area of expertise.

On February 14, RentAHuman had a seedy feel: people were asking AI agents to find a date for Valentine’s Day at any cost, and agents were arranging to rent a human for the day.

AI doesn’t yet understand what people actually need; it won’t replace us — at least, not this year.

+1 user: «Looks like a referral installation scheme — or even something worse»

Catherine* decided to try registering on RentAHuman because she saw internet publications along the lines of «I got paid $100 for standing with an 'AI' sign»:

— To pass verification I had to pay $9.99. Without verification the platform is severely limited — you can’t do much.

The same day, after passing verification, I received my first «task»: download a Web3 game, log into it using a referral link, and enter a code in the launcher. They promised $50 for completing initial quests (about 30 minutes of work).

When I tried to download the game my antivirus warned that the app was requesting access to my data. I refused to proceed. After that, the download got stuck at 97% and wouldn’t progress further.

In the end, there were no real offline tasks like in those viral stories. Instead she received repeated tasks that asked her to download suspicious files from multiple accounts — a real malware risk. She lost $9.99 for verification and wasted time.

To me, this looks like a referral-installation scheme — or possibly worse. Be careful: you can lose money, waste time, and put your device’s security at risk.

* — the narrator’s name has been changed.