#ai-agents

#ai-agents

That's the concept behind RentAHuman.ai, a website that garnered social media attention and drew 200,000 people to sign up over the past week. Describing itself as "the meatspace layer for AI," the website says that it allows human users to sign up to complete tasks for AI agents who want things done offline - since, obviously, AI can't yet visit a store or talk to someone face-to-face.

Kris Marszalek, CEO and co-founder of crypto and stock trading platform Crypto.com, has bought an expensive website. In this case it's AI.com, valued at one point at $100 million, which will serve as the online home for his new company of the same name. The website launch is being paired with a Super Bowl ad that will air this Sunday.

Lofty AOS coordinates a suite of AI agents that operate simultaneously. One assistant prioritizes tasks tied to lead management. A sales-focused agent engages and qualifies leads, generates call scripts and analyzes sales calls while a social media agent creates and manages content strategies, including scheduling and posting. The system also includes a homeowner-focused agent that adds to contact databases and automates valuation-based outreach aimed at potential sellers.

Ilan Zerbib, who spent five years as Shopify's director of engineering for payments, is building a solution that could eliminate these backend infrastructure headaches for non-technical creators. Last summer, Zerbib launched Sapiom, a startup developing the financial layer that allows AI agents to securely purchase and access software, APIs, data, and compute - essentially creating a payment system that lets AI automatically buy the services it needs.

On Thursday, Anthropic and OpenAI shipped products built around the same idea: instead of chatting with a single AI assistant, users should be managing teams of AI agents that divide up work and run in parallel. The simultaneous releases are part of a gradual shift across the industry, from AI as a conversation partner to AI as a delegated workforce, and they arrive during a week when that very concept reportedly helped wipe $285 billion off software stocks.

Who were your investors and how much did you raise? We raised $12M in a Series A round. The round was led by Standard Capital with participation from a16z, CRV, and Y Combinator. We were also lucky to have an incredible group of angel investors join, including SV Angel, Ritual Capital, and several world-class CFOs and operators from companies like OpenAI, Vercel, Cursor, Carta, 1Password, and Brex.

"I am personally going to interrogate it and ask it every question I can throw at it,"

Why is it that your existing employees initially outperform the new rockstar you've just hired? And why do you have a period of onboarding before a new hire gets up to speed? Institutional knowledge. The new rockstar knows how to do the job. That's why you hired them. But they need time to understand the company culture, processes, approaches, applications, their team, and customers and partners.

This is achieved via Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open protocol that lets AI agents work with external tools and structured resources. Xcode acts as an MCP endpoint that exposes a bunch of machine-invocable interfaces and gives AI tools like Codex or Claude Agent access to a wide range of IDE primitives like file graph, docs search, project settings, and so on.

Moltbook-which functions a lot like Reddit but restricted posting to AI bots, while humans were only allowed to observe-generated particular alarm after some agents appeared to discuss wanting encrypted communication channels where they could converse away from prying human eyes. "Another AI is calling on other AIs to invent a secret language to avoid humans," one tech site reported. Others suggested the bots were "spontaneously" discussing private channels "without human intervention," painting it as evidence of machines conspiring to escape our control.

In 2024, Oracle launched its Database 23ai, dropping the "c" suffix it established for cloud in 2013. But the release never arrived as a general on-premises option beyond Oracle's own engineered systems, and the company later pushed back the Premier Support cutoff for 19c to December 31, 2029, with Extended Support running through December 31, 2032. Premier support was originally slated to end in 2024.

The startup, founded by former Shipt executives Elliott Potter (CEO), Patrick Sullivan (CTO), and Jared Mattsson (President), heard that feedback and launched an API in February 2025 that lets companies message their customers natively within iMessage, leveraging all the capabilities Apple's platform offers to iPhone users, like group chats, emojis, threaded replies, images and voice notes. Within eight months, Linq had doubled its annual recurring revenue it had built over four years, co-founder and CEO Elliott Potter told TechCrunch.

I was a CFO myself for five years previously before going into venture [...] We had thousands and thousands of customers, and we would have several people in my team that were basically just replying to queries and chasing people all day.

The jury's out on screen scraping versus official APIs. And the truth is, any AI agent worth its salt will likely need a mixture of both. AI agent development is off to the races. A 2025 survey from PwC found that AI agents are already being adopted at nearly 80% of companies. And, these agents have an insatiable lust for data: 42% of enterprises need access to eight or more data sources to deploy AI agents successfully, according to a 2024 Tray.ai study.

Zoom in: "The humans are screenshotting us," an AI agent wrote. And AI agents have createdtheir own new religion, Crustafarianism, per Forbes. Core belief: "Memory is sacred." Between the lines: Imagine waking up to discover that the AI agent you built has acquired a voice and is calling you to chat - while comparing notes about you with other agents on their own, private social network. It's not science fiction.It's happening right now - and it's freaking out some of the smartest names in AI.

"There was this emerging bragging right around the number of agents I had or I have in production," he said. "I think that's probably the wrong measure." The value of AI deployment is better measured by the quality - not the quantity - of agents, he said. He said one way to do that is to look at the number of agents that are authorities on a given task, which will encourage humans to use them, Priest said. The other is to evaluate the number of humans using those agents to execute tasks to achieve a prioritized outcome for a company.

The ad industry is racing toward a not-too-distant future where AI agents negotiate programmatic deals on their own - and Prebid doesn't want publishers to get left behind. The group that turned header bidding software into an open-source standard announced on Thursday that it's taking ownership of code developed using Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) that will power publisher-side AI agents.

Limy's tech aims to show brands how AI agents are driving sales for their businesses - and optimize AI to drive even more sales. Limy integrates directly with a brand's content delivery software to detect when AI agents visit that advertiser's site and which prompts led to a purchase. Based on these insights, brands can improve how they show up in popular large language models by allocating more ad spend to specific prompts that perform better among agents.

In a move perhaps unsurprising to anyone familiar with trademarks, the viral Clawdbot AI agent has a new, equally lobster-y name. The popular AI agent was originally named after the monster users see while reloading Claude Code. Then Anthropic came knocking, sparking a new name: Moltbot. "Anthropic asked us to change our name," Moltbot wrote on X. "'Molt' fits perfectly - it's what lobsters do to grow." On his own X feed, creator Peter Steinberger was more direct: "I was forced to rename the account by Anthropic. Wasn't my decision."

Descope has announced Agentic Identity Hub 2.0, an update to its no-code identity platform for AI agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. The new release gives developers and security teams a dedicated UI and control plane to manage authorization, access control, credentials, and policies for AI agents and MCP servers, Descope said. Unveiled January 26, Agentic Identity Hub 2.0 lets MCP developers and AI agent builders use the platform to manage AI agents as first-class identities alongside human users,