Sydney Huang Launches Human API to Enable AI Systems to Directly Hire Humans

ChainCatcher News: Babson College graduate Sydney Huang announced today the launch of Human API, a new platform designed to enable AI systems to directly collaborate with humans to obtain real-world data and labor. Huang also serves as the CEO of Eclipse Labs, the company behind Human API. "AI agents are no longer limited by intelligence," said Sydney Huang. "They are limited by access to the physical world. Human API exists precisely to bridge this gap." Human API aims to solve what the company calls the "last-mile problem" for autonomous AI agents. While modern agents can reason, plan, and execute tasks in digital environments, many economically valuable activities still require human involvement, such as completing deliveries, collecting data, and interacting with institutions that have not yet implemented API access. Human API provides agents with a standardized interface to request, coordinate, and pay humans to complete these tasks. The platform will initially focus on voice data, one of the most constrained input forms for current AI systems. Audio is a high-information-density modality that includes language, accents, emotions, timing, and environmental context. However, due to licensing restrictions, compression artifacts, and insufficient metadata, high-quality, labeled audio data is difficult to scale. As a result, many voice and multimodal models perform poorly in non-English languages, regional accents, bilingual speech, overlapping conversations, and subtle emotional expressions. Human API enables global contributors to provide high-quality, multilingual audio using standard consumer-grade devices, significantly lowering the barrier to entry. The company states that this approach allows AI systems to access data that cannot be reliably scraped or synthetically generated. Although still in stealth mode, Human API has already completed its first paid data deliveries to enterprise customers, validating market demand from both buyers seeking broader coverage datasets and contributors willing to provide that data. David Feiock, a general partner at Anagram and investor in Human API, said: "AI agents are strong in reasoning, but they still face challenges in the last mile, where coordination, data collection, and human judgment are required. The appeal of Human API lies in its treatment of the human layer as infrastructure. It is not a managed service or generalized crowdsourcing, but rather an agent-focused, rights-conscious approach that integrates humans into the system and enables instant payments." Human API plans to expand in the future to include more human-provided data forms beyond voice, as well as the execution of real-world tasks. Currently, the platform is accepting contributor registrations at thehumanapi.com.