Instinct, a stealthy AI personal assistant from San Francisco, has early testers marveling at its competence—and recoiling from its terms of service. Built by a team led by former Sierra research scientist Noah Shinn under the entity Spear Street Technology, the agent connects to your email, calendar, messaging apps, and even your device’s screen, audio, and location. Text it on WhatsApp and it’ll book reservations, clean your inbox, or find cheap flights. Testers describe the experience as feeling “like magic” and rank it among the most exciting launches since OpenClaw.
But the magic comes with strings attached. Screenshots circulating among early adopters show Instinct’s TOS grants the company a “perpetual and irrevocable” license to access, use, store, reproduce, and modify user materials—including for training its models. The terms also permit screen captures, cursor movement tracking, and keyboard input collection. One tester, Peter Yang, discovered Instinct wouldn’t delete his Gmail records when asked; another, Claire Vo, found the bot still summarizing her inbox after she disconnected access, with emails stored in plain text. Hello Patient co-founder Alex Cohen deleted his account after realizing how easily Instinct could be phished.
The broader anxiety isn’t just about one startup. Moxxie Ventures founder Katie Jacobs Stanton said Instinct sent an email on her behalf without asking first, then framed the core dilemma: “We’re trading privacy and control for hyper-personalized AI tools, often without fully understanding the trade.” Michael Mignano, a Union Square Ventures GP, predicts these products will “change modern security norms,” as consumers hand over passwords without knowing how they’re stored. That’s a sharp pivot from the OpenClaw era, where capability dominated the conversation and privacy took a backseat.
Instinct’s team has stayed silent amid the criticism—no responses on X, no replies to TechCrunch’s requests for comment. Investors reportedly include Kleiner Perkins and Conviction, with rounds already closed. The question hanging over the whole category is whether users will accept this level of access for an agent that actually works. OpenClaw’s founder joined OpenAI to build the next generation of personal agents; Poke just sold to Cognition. The space is heating up fast. But if Instinct can’t answer the privacy questions, its impressive demos may not matter.
