19-May-2025 :

Firecrawl, a web intelligence platform incubated at Y Combinator, is making headlines by offering $1 million in contracts to hire three AI agents as full-time 'employees.' This move is one of the boldest public experiments to test the boundaries of AI autonomy and real-world productivity.
Rather than relying solely on AI for backend assistance, Firecrawl’s founders want to explore what happens when agents are given persistent responsibilities—like managing growth strategies, product operations, or even investor relations. Each agent will be onboarded with its own context, tasks, and data access, and evaluated based on performance outcomes.
The selected AI agents, whether open-source or built on commercial models, will be integrated into Firecrawl’s internal systems and run continuously as salaried digital workers. Each will receive a $250,000 to $500,000 annual budget allocation depending on role, scope, and performance.
Co-founder Kacper Łukawski notes this initiative stems from Firecrawl’s vision to build a completely autonomous research and development layer that can adapt to the evolving needs of AI-powered applications. With more AI-native companies emerging, Firecrawl sees long-term promise in treating agents as actual team members.
The company’s core platform already uses intelligent crawling, semantic search, and memory features to enable automated browsing and real-time API generation. This hiring experiment could extend that mission—turning agents from tools into collaborators.
Interested developers and AI teams are invited to apply on Firecrawl’s website (firecrawl.dev) with proposals on how their AI agents could drive real value inside the company. Firecrawl’s team will select the top three candidates over the next month, with roles expected to start immediately after selection.