Instinct's AI assistant asks for a perpetual license

The fastest way to find out what an AI assistant actually does with your data is to read its terms of service before you connect your inbox. Almost nobody does. This week a wave of early testers connected everything to Instinct, a private-beta personal assistant, and then went back and read the paperwork.

What actually happened

TechCrunch reported on August 24 that Instinct — built by a small San Francisco team led by former Sierra research scientist Noah Shinn, operating as Spear Street Technology, with money from Kleiner Perkins and Conviction — is drawing serious criticism from the same testers who called it magical.

The assistant connects to email, messaging apps, and calendar, and asks for device audio, location, screen capture, and keyboard input. It can enter agreements and transactions on your behalf. You drive it by text, WhatsApp, or a phone call.

Per TechCrunch's reading, the terms grant Instinct a perpetual and irrevocable license to access, host, store, reproduce, transmit, publish, distribute, and modify user materials, including to train and fine-tune its models. Google Workspace data is carved out because Google's Limited Use policy forces the carve-out. Microsoft data, screen captures, and keystrokes are not carved out.

Testers reported specific failures: Gmail records that would not delete on request (later fixed), emails still stored in plain text after access was disconnected, a working phishing path to another user's email, and the bot sending mail without approval.

Why AI assistant permissions matter for your business

A personal tool touching a work account is a business decision. The moment one person connects that assistant to a shared inbox, your customer emails, quotes, and vendor contracts fall under someone else's license grant. Nobody filed a ticket. Nobody signed a DPA.

Disconnect is not delete. Revoking OAuth access stops new reads. It says nothing about what is already sitting in the vendor's store, and the tester who found plaintext mail after disconnecting proved the gap. Ask for the deletion endpoint and the retention window in writing, before the integration, not after.

Write-scope is the line. Read access to a calendar is a small blast radius. An agent that can send mail and sign agreements as you is a signing authority you handed to a beta. Scope agents to read plus draft, and keep a human on the send button until the vendor can show you an audit log.

Sources: TechCrunch, Instinct Terms of Service.