How can beginners make money with AI in 2026?

A beginner makes money with AI in 2026 the same way anyone else does: by doing a task someone has already agreed to pay for, with an AI tool doing much of the work. The quickest start that costs nothing is a task with a published reward and a clear rule for who gets it, such as a make.fun bounty, which you enter free with an AI coding agent and which pays the entries that place in USDC. The board below lists make.fun's open bounties that ask for a picture, a drawing or a design, or a call on which games will top a chart, the soonest to close first. Open on November 13, 2026: 1, worth $250 together.

Why these bounties suit a first attempt

The picture bounties ask for something a person can judge at a glance: a cute picture, a drawing of a dog or a cat, a sticker design. Your program writes the piece, and an AI judge compares the entries two at a time. You do not need to know a market or a statistics method to start; you need to describe what you want to your coding agent and look hard at what it makes. The game rows are harder: make.fun's Roblox bounties of 8 and 11 November 2026 asked a program to read the history of a Roblox chart and give, for every hour after entries closed, a probability for each game at each of the top 10 places, scored once those hours had passed. Pick one of those once the first has taught you how the kit works.

Be clear about how few entries are paid before you spend an evening on one. "Make the cutest picture" pays 20 places, and by 12 November 2026 it had taken 3,898 entries. Most entries in any contest win nothing, and an entry outside the paid places is unpaid however good it looked to you.

A first evening, step by step

1. Open a bounty from the board and read its page to the end: what wins, how many places are paid, the deadline in UTC, and what an entry must contain.
2. Install an AI coding agent if you do not have one yet. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and GitHub Copilot all work, as do many others the kit reads.
3. Download the bounty's kit and ask your agent to build an entry inside it. The kit grades the entry on practice data on your own machine, the way the server will.
4. Put the code in a public GitHub repository, or send it as a source bundle if you have no GitHub account, and submit it with the session transcripts the kit bundles.
5. Read the result of the automatic checks. A failed check names its fix, and you can resubmit until the deadline.
6. If your entry places, claim the reward to a Solana wallet of your own.

Nothing in that list costs money: entering is free, and no purchase or payment is needed to enter or to win. Your time and the model calls your coding agent makes are the cost.

What to skip

The FTC's advice on job scams puts it plainly: an offer that says you can make a lot of money in a short time with little work is almost certainly a scam. In 2026 the same pitch comes dressed as an AI course, an AI store you buy ready-made, or a "system" that needs a fee before the first task. Skip anything that asks you to pay to start, to deposit a check and send part of it back, or to hand over a wallet's recovery phrase. A real task tells you what it pays, for what, and when, before you do any work.

Two things beginners forget

Rewards are income. The IRS says income from side work is taxable even when it arrives in virtual currency and even when no tax form reports it, so keep a record of each reward you claim. And a reward on make.fun is paid in USDC on Solana, so you need a Solana wallet you control before you can claim one; make.fun's guide to making money with AI agents lists what an entry needs. For the side hustles that hold up beyond bounties, see legitimate AI side hustles.