One of the first things I did when I left my full-time job at WIRED was give Claude Cowork access to my email and calendar. After reporting on artificial intelligence for years, I was curious about what the technology could do for me. I had imagined Cowork as a hyper-capable digital assistant, but was let down to discover that it was more like interacting with a regular chatbot, albeit one with extra tools. What did I want it to do? I had no idea.
Then Instinct, an invite-only AI agent that communicates with users through iMessage and WhatsApp, started popping off in the Bay Area. It connects to your email, calendar, and messaging apps. Think of it as OpenClaw for normies. The company, which launched in private beta in February, is reportedly in talks to raise $1 billion on top of the $350 million it’s already raised, bringing its valuation to $10 billion, according to The Information.
Instinct’s moment in the spotlight comes as Meta is experiencing its own unexpected burst of popularity thanks to Muse, an AI assistant the tech giant launched earlier this month. As of writing, Muse is the most popular free app in Apple’s App Store, with more than 900,000 downloads, according to third-party estimates. The commentator class on X seems genuinely excited about it, despite the fact that it rolled out with a serious security vulnerability that would have “let attackers do ‘whatever’ they wanted on a victim’s Mac,” according to Ars Technica. I’m not about to give Meta a ton of my personal information, but if Muse can keep me logged into Bloomberg or unsubscribe me from Hot Yoga São Paulo, which has been emailing me once a week since 2017, I’ll reconsider.
Agent Provocateur
The divide between people who use AI agents for everything and those who have never tried one has never been wider. It explains, in part, why tech CEOs were largely caught off guard by the data center backlash. If you think agents can automate the majority of people’s administrative drudgery and turbocharge their productivity, the costs and disruptions associated with building data centers might look like an acceptable trade-off. But if you’re using chatbots as a fancy form of Google, that deal is probably much less appealing.
The overarching problem, as technology journalist Jasmine Sun writes, is that “most people’s problems are not software-shaped, and most won’t notice even when they are.” AI agents, like chatbots, still require a lot of input and direction from users. If you know what you want—help with your homework, a virtual girlfriend—the tools are eager to provide. But if you don’t, well, welcome to the permanent underclass.
I was eager to avoid such a fate. I may not be agentic, but I like to think I’m action-oriented. Surely I could identify a software-shaped problem in my life. I had used Claude previously to generate a few freelance invoices, saving me approximately 10 minutes. It was nice, but not life-changing. I decided to give Instinct a try.
If you talk to AI researchers about Instinct, you’ll hear the phrase “form factor” a lot. Instinct got the form factor right—no open text box, just iMessage, WhatsApp, and a few helpful prompts. It’s hard to overstate how important this is. Rather than trying to figure out for yourself how to make the chat experience more useful, you’re texting with an agent that’s suggesting things it can do for you, and then actually doing them. And unlike other agents in this space, it doesn’t text too much. I tried a competing agent called Lindy for a week and deleted it after it texted me each morning and started popping into Zoom meetings without my approval.
For its first project, I gave Instinct my itinerary for a work trip to Venice, Italy. I had it book reservations based on where I was going to be, including WhatsApping hole-in-the-wall spots. Success! Restaurant reservations appear to be a gateway drug for many agent-curious people, and I was no exception. (It’s worth noting that while Muse can also call restaurants to book reservations on your behalf, some of those calls are reportedly made by humans in call centers, according to reporting in 404 Media).
Next, I gave Instinct a more complicated task. I had already booked a trip to New York in November with my sister when WIRED asked me to attend the WIRED World Fair, which was taking place in Miami the day before. Unfortunately, I’d booked a saver fare, meaning I couldn’t move the ticket, and if I missed the first leg of the trip it would automatically cancel the whole thing.
Could Instinct cancel my trip and get a refund? To my surprise, it could. The agent detected that Alaska had moved my flight 90 minutes earlier, a fact I’d completely missed, which qualified me for a full refund. It canceled my ticket, saving me roughly $550, and rebooked my one-way return to San Francisco. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m starting to feel the AGI.
Unnatural Instincts
This is where I have to pause and acknowledge the risks of using Instinct. There are a lot. People have reported that when they tried to disconnect the agent from their email, they found out it was retaining a copy of their inboxes anyway. One venture capitalist said he was banned from Resy after the bot pinged its API roughly 200 times per hour while trying to make a reservation. Another tech investor said he deleted the app after determining that it would be trivially easy for Instinct to be phished.
Instinct’s Terms of Service are pretty far-reaching, allowing the company to use at least some of your conversations to train its AI models. I also experienced an annoying (if minor) snafu: One day, Instinct canceled a DoorDash order that was seriously delayed, forcing me to forfeit $64. (I’d explicitly told it to cancel only if I could get a refund.) This alerted me to another thing Instinct is very, very good at: profusely apologizing without offering to pay for its mistakes.
The company Instinct, which shares the same name as its flagship AI agent, did not respond to requests for comment from WIRED.
Instinct feels like a mildly chaotic personal assistant, and since I’ve never had a real human assistant, I’m sticking with it. Last week it told me “NOT TO OPEN” an email from a friend inviting me to a backyard BBQ—it turned out to be a phishing scam. Agents are a security nightmare. I get it! But I’m busy. I’m a mom. Everything feels like a security nightmare these days. For now, I’m willing to take the risk.
