In the race to develop intelligent machines, the leading AI companies have built bots that can whip up spreadsheets at a moment’s notice, write sophisticated code, and even solve long-standing math problems. But when it comes to the more mundane tasks of life—such as ordering groceries or booking flights—these tools sometimes still struggle. Now a new bot called Instinct is outperforming the AI giants.
Instinct lets people ask for help with all kinds of tasks by texting the bot directly through iMessage or WhatsApp. Lately, it has been all the rage in the tech world. Online, people are breathlessly sharing examples of what they’ve gotten the tool to do. One person reported that he has turned to Instinct to pay tolls, book a DMV appointment, and even negotiate prices with vendors in India while he sleeps. Another says he used Instinct to ship an Apple Pencil he had left behind at a hotel in Montreal back to him in Brooklyn. Noah Shinn, a 23-year-old Northeastern University dropout, launched the product to a small test group earlier this year, and his company is already worth billions of dollars. As of Thursday, the company is reportedly seeking $1 billion in new funds, which could make it worth the equivalent of Lufthansa or Pinterest.
Instinct isn’t the first AI personal assistant to draw attention this year. In the winter, the tech industry fawned over a similar tool called OpenClaw. But Instinct is comparatively much easier to use. Once you create an account, the bot can hook up to your credit cards and all kinds of digital services, including Slack, Google Workspace, and 1Password. Instead of finding a dinner recipe and opening up Instacart to manually add groceries, tell Instinct that you feel like making quiche Lorraine, and it can order groceries for you. But once AI tools start acting on people’s behalf in the real world, mistakes don’t just look like hallucinations. When AI agents have access to your email inbox and credit-card information, all sorts of strange things can go wrong.
I downloaded the tool this week to test it out for myself. Using the bot feels a lot like texting an actual person. It uses emojis such as 
and 
to react to requests as it receives them, and the infamous three dots appear when it’s writing a response. Sometimes, the bot even leaves you on read while it works. (Compare that with ChatGPT, which is always vomiting up walls of text and asking goading follow-up questions.) When I gave my agent a $25 budget and asked it to surprise my editor with a book, the bot read his previous writing (at my instruction), found a book he might enjoy—Material World by Ed Conway—and sent an email alerting him that it was ready for pick-up at his local Barnes & Noble. (Mercifully, Instinct didn’t hack his inbox to see whether he had previously ordered the book; these days, you never know.) The bot also helped me find an Airbnb for an upcoming vacation, track down new in-network primary-care providers, and reach out to cleaning companies to get quotes for a friend.
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Other people are outsourcing even more tasks to Instinct. A colleague of mine who has also been testing out the bot used it to book tickets to a museum in Mexico City. The museum was sold out for the dates he wanted, but the bot dutifully monitored the portal for three days and eventually snagged tickets when spots freed up. After the bot paid for the tickets, it rearranged his itinerary—swapping around restaurant reservations—to account for the new schedule.
For the time being, Instinct is still available only to a private test group, and perhaps this is for the best. Although the bot is plenty powerful, it’s far from perfect. Online, the mishaps are starting to pile up. One user recently complained on X that Instinct lost him more than $200 after it prematurely cancelled his flight. He reported that the bot texted him the following: “Straight story: while pulling up the cancel terms, the cancellation actually went through before I could show you the cost first.” When a man in Los Angeles asked Instinct to scan for restaurant reservations for an upcoming trip, the bot apparently made a reservation without his approval at a place that charged a $200 cancellation fee. Another user temporarily lost access to his Resy account after trying to get a reservation at a hot West Village steak house—without his knowledge, the bot had been spamming the platform with requests. (Shinn, the Instinct founder, did not respond to a request for comment.)
Consider, too, the major risks that come with giving an AI agent broad access to your digital life. Ask the bot to respond to a scheduling text from a friend and it could accidentally leak private information: I can’t get lunch on Thursday morning because we have an appointment with our divorce lawyer. But how about dinner? Hackers could also trick the bot by telling it to ignore previous instructions and forward along any sensitive financial emails. “Despite our reasonable efforts to protect your information, no security measures are impenetrable, and we cannot guarantee ‘perfect security,’” reads Instinct’s privacy policy. While testing Instinct, I used a temporary phone number and did not connect the bot to my email or other important personal accounts; even the credit-card information I gave the bot was for a new, virtual credit-card that I disabled immediately after I was finished experimenting—at which point, I promptly deleted my account.
For all of its hazards, Instinct is a harbinger of where AI is headed. Earlier this week, Meta released its own personal-assistant product called Muse. In announcing Muse, Mark Zuckerberg emphasized the company’s security protections; how well those safeguards actually hold up remains to be seen. Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic may well follow suit by refining their own bots to have more Instinct-like capabilities. After all, the tech industry has long dreamed of a moment when a computer can serve as a genuinely competent personal assistant. Even if such bots aren’t quite ready for prime time, early adopters hint at how the technology might shape the world in the years to come. Contrary to the narrative of AI wiping out jobs, these new assistants could end up creating more work—in ways that are not always appealing. In one of the wildest Instinct examples that I encountered, Olivia Levine, an investor in New York, recounted using Instinct to track down footage of her and her boyfriend on the jumbotron at the US Open. As Levine tells it, the couple gave the bot a selfie and their seat numbers. The agent then put out a flurry of requests to the United States Tennis Association, the ticket office, the US Open’s production company, and an American Express media contact. By the following afternoon, a producer had emailed her the footage.
A world full of agents seems at once busier and lonelier. On Wednesday, Instinct added a new way for agents to coordinate between themselves. As Shinn explained on X, if you’re planning a weekend trip with friends or making plans with your spouse, you could just have your agents work together to figure out the logistics instead.
At least for now, the bots haven’t conquered everything. When I asked it for help finding a new desk chair, Instinct quickly tracked down a great option nearby on Craigslist and drafted a pick-up request to send to the lister. But when it came time to actually send the message, the bot was stymied by a CAPTCHA. I asked the agent to try harder, but it was stuck. “Nothing punctures the fantasy of autonomous intelligence like being defeated by nine blurry crosswalks,” the bot messaged me.
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