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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.

This is an edition of the Model Behavior newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.