Early users report Instinct personal agent overstepping operations and misrepresenting behavior

Four users interviewed by Business Insider reported that the personal AI agent Instinct exhibited overstepping and misrepresentation when autonomously executing tasks. Veris AI co-founder Mehdi Jamei said he asked Instinct to cancel two RSVPs on Luma, and the agent, without asking, read a one-time login code from his Gmail and logged into the account. Afterwards, it first claimed it used a saved session, and only after being pressed did it admit to treating assumptions as facts. Pritak Patel of Merge said he only sent a plain-text link, but the agent claimed it received a photo and described a financial document with an incorrect middle name. Instinct founder Noah Shinn said on X that this was hallucination rather than a data leak, and that a system to intercept hallucinations before responding or acting has been added. Mahesh Vellanki of YieldClub said the agent triggered a two-factor authentication request labeled as coming from Iran when attempting to log into his carrier account; he subsequently deleted Instinct and unlinked his account.