At this point, legally I don't think an AI can hold a contract with a person and so I don't think an AI could hire human and so they couldn't fire a person.

That doesn't mean the AI couldn't be the decision maker for the legal entity that's hiring these people.

But the thing is that if this startup is telling these people they are employees of this company, not "Luna", it would give these people the impression that all their interactions with the AI are kind of a sham, a game, not to be taken seriously and they are basically being paid to role-play as "Luna's employees".

And this kind of where such experiments are likely to go. Another user mentioned that it would be useful to discover the kind of inputs and output the machine. A human boss could manage a store with just phone calls and a camera but I overall get the vague impression Luna doesn't have anything like that sort of ability, though really we just aren't given the information for any accurate determination.