Instinct's AI assistant can plan your wedding and cancel your subscriptions. Its terms of service also let it keep your data forever.
The company raised $250 million in a Series B round this week. That brings total funding to $350 million at a $2.5 billion valuation.
The Funding
Index Ventures and Benchmark co-led the round. Founder Noah Shinn started the company just last year and is only 23.
Instinct connects to a user's apps and devices, communicating through text or WhatsApp. Shinn described the response on social media this week.
"They've told us they've planned cross-country road trips, bought weekly groceries and concert tickets, and cancelled hundreds of dollars of subscriptions," Shinn wrote. "Someone's even planning their wedding with Instinct."
What's Actually in the Terms of Service
The product remains in private beta, but its terms of service have already drawn real scrutiny. The company revised those terms on August 20.
The language grants Instinct a "perpetual and irrevocable" license to user materials. That includes the right to store, reproduce, transmit and use that data to train its own AI models.
Data collection goes well beyond app connections. Instinct's terms describe capturing screen recordings, cursor movements and keyboard inputs directly from a user's device.
That level of access is unusual even by AI agent standards. Most competing assistants connect to specific apps through defined permissions rather than capturing raw device activity continuously.
One detail stands out beyond data collection. The terms reportedly let Instinct enter agreements or transactions on a user's behalf. Those actions would be binding, without requiring explicit approval each time.
A Specific Complaint That Raised Alarms
The concerns aren't purely theoretical. One named tester, Peter Yang, reported that Instinct wouldn't delete his Gmail records when he asked it to.
The company later added a tool for deleting external data in response. Neither Instinct nor Shinn has publicly addressed the broader criticism.
That silence is notable given the scale of the funding round. A company raising $250 million typically has a communications team ready for exactly this kind of scrutiny.
Founder Noah Shinn previously worked as a research scientist at Sierra, the AI customer service company. That background gives him direct experience building autonomous agents. He's now applying it to a product acting on an individual's behalf instead of a company's.
What This Means for Miami
This is the same underlying tension MAIN has covered in workplace AI governance debates.
How much access does an AI agent actually need to be useful? How much of that access does the person granting it actually understand?
For Miami consumers and small businesses considering AI assistants like Instinct, the practical lesson is straightforward. Read what permissions you're actually granting before connecting an AI agent to email, calendars or financial accounts.
That's true regardless of how impressive the product's early reviews sound.
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