Silicon Valley has been buzzing about Instinct, a personal AI assistant that can book travel, manage your inbox, schedule appointments, and handle life admin by connecting to your email, calendar, messages, screen, and location. Early testers called it magical. Then they looked at what it was storing.
What happened
Claire Vo disconnected Instinct from Google at 11 AM. At 2 PM, the assistant sent her an email summary. When she investigated, Instinct confirmed it had stored her emails in plain text for future searches—and there was no delete button. Peter Yang found the same issue and couldn't remove his Gmail records when he asked.
Instinct's terms grant the company a permanent, transferable license to access, store, modify, and train AI models on anything you view—not just what you send it. That includes screen content, messages, passwords, payment info, and health records. The terms also let Instinct make binding purchases and agreements on your behalf.
After Vo's post went viral, the team pushed an overnight fix adding a data deletion tool. But the episode revealed how powerful—and risky—giving an AI agent this much access can be.