Instinct review: the invite-only AI assistant you text

Instinct is a personal AI assistant you text or call. It uses a phone and a computer the way you would, so you can ask it to book a train, order groceries or send flowers and it goes and does it. It’s free, but only if you can get in: Instinct is invite-only, with no public sign-up and no published prices. If you have an invite and are comfortable with its data terms, it’s one of the most natural agents to use. If you don’t, Poke is the closest texting assistant you can sign up for today, and Muse the closest errand agent.

For a short introduction, read What is Instinct?. This page is about Instinct the AI assistant, not AMD’s Instinct data-center chips.

Who Instinct is for

Instinct’s pitch is that “there are no new interfaces” (instinct.com). You don’t learn an app; you message it like an assistant. That suits:

• Busy people with lots of small errands. Travel is its biggest use. Founder Noah Shinn told Fortune that annual transaction volume is close to $1 billion, about half of it travel (Fortune).
• Groups making plans. Since October, early-access users can add Instinct to a group chat, and friends without an account can use it there (TechCrunch).
• People who prefer texting to apps. Invited users reach it through WhatsApp and iMessage (Digit).

It’s a poor fit if you need it for team work, want to pick the AI model, or want a written price before you commit.

On our checklist, it acts in your accounts, keeps working in the background and follows up with you on its own (Built In). What it misses is about access, not ability: none of its channels is open to the public, so it doesn’t count as living in your chat apps.

What’s new

Instinct has grown in a few months, mostly through invites passed between users. Shinn says the company has spent “$0 on marketing so far” (Fortune). The recent timeline:

• August: invite-only beta with five invites per user, a $250 million round, and a backlash over terms that granted a “perpetual and irrevocable” license to user materials. The terms were revised on August 26.
• September 8: Meta launched Muse, a direct rival. Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang publicly mocked Instinct as “Insect”, and Instinct raised a $1 billion Series C at a $10 billion valuation weeks later (Fortune).
• October 5: group chats, plus phone calling, which TechCrunch says both Instinct and Muse recently added.
• November 2: Instinct stopped replying on WhatsApp for part of a morning. Shinn said “a configuration issue on our side interrupted payments to one of our service providers”, and that messages sent during the outage were received (Digit). Some users also reported their WhatsApp accounts being banned. The cause of that hasn’t been explained.

The outage is worth noting for a different reason: Instinct depends on other companies’ messaging platforms, and one of them, WhatsApp, belongs to its biggest competitor.

Real use cases

The homepage examples are ordering groceries, booking a train, sending flowers and finding a court. Reporting adds:

• Travel. Flights, trains and hotels, the bulk of its transactions.
• Subscription cancellations and other tasks that usually mean waiting on hold or clicking through a website.
• Group plans. Weddings, trips and carpools, where the shared Instinct in a group chat handles the coordinating (Fortune, TechCrunch).

Where it struggles: Vellum, which sells a competing product, summarized early tester reports of Instinct running into CAPTCHAs and two-factor walls, and of everything living in one long thread with no way to separate projects (Vellum). Treat a competitor’s write-up with care, but those limits are common to agents that use a browser.

How Instinct compares

vs Muse. The main matchup. Muse is open in the US, Canada, Japan, Singapore and Mexico, has a free tier and paid plans, its own app, and Meta’s resources behind it. Instinct is invite-only and free for now; once you’re in, it lives in your existing messaging apps and works in group chats. If you can get in, Instinct feels more like a person. If you can’t, Muse is available today.

vs Poke. Poke is the same idea with the door open: you sign up with your phone number and text it in iMessage or Telegram. It connects to your email, calendar and other apps, runs shareable automations, and messages you first when something needs attention. It has a free plan and published paid tiers. Instinct leans further into real-world errands like travel and group plans; Poke into your inbox and calendar. Without an invite, Poke is the one to try.

vs Grok Bot. Grok Bot is a full app where you run several named Bots on a cloud computer, with Slack and team controls. It costs at least $30 a month. Instinct is one assistant you text. For work routines, Grok Bot. For personal errands, Instinct.

vs OpenClaw. Both meet you in messaging apps. OpenClaw is open source and runs on your own machine, so you choose the model, pay for it yourself and keep your data local. It takes real setup. Instinct is hosted, takes no setup, and you can’t choose its model.

vs Manus. Manus produces things, such as reports, sites and slide decks, and bills in credits. Instinct handles errands. They don’t overlap much.

Pricing advice

Instinct is free during the beta, and nothing about future prices has been published. Its terms already include a section on paid services, so expect it to charge at some point. Until it does:

• Get an invite from someone who uses it, or join the waitlist. Invites have been resold online. Don’t pay for one.
• Don’t build habits you couldn’t afford later. Third-party guesses about future pricing exist, but none come from the company.

Privacy

Read the terms before you connect your email. In short:

• Training is on by default. Instinct can use your materials to train AI models unless you opt out at app.instinct.com/settings. The opt-out only applies going forward, and material flagged for safety review can still be used.
• The Vault is excluded. Items you store in Instinct’s Vault are not used for training.
• It acts as your agent. The terms make Instinct your agent for entering agreements and transactions, and they include binding arbitration with a class action waiver.
• Testers have reported problems. One report said Instinct sent an email without asking (Startup Fortune). In August, testers said it kept stored copies of their Gmail messages after they revoked access, and the company later added a setting for deleting external data (Unbiased Headlines). Vellum reported that a test email with hidden instructions manipulated it.

Instinct has improved since the August terms backlash, but the current terms still favor the company. Give it only the accounts a task needs.

What we don’t know yet

Instinct publishes less than its rivals, so some basics are still open questions:

• Price. No plans or prices have been announced, only a terms section saying paid features may come.
• Models. Instinct doesn’t say which AI models it uses, and you can’t choose one.
• Scale. The company hasn’t published a user count. Shinn’s transaction-volume figure is the main number on record.
• Support. During the November WhatsApp interruption, the update came from Shinn’s post on X (Digit).

None of these are reasons to avoid it on their own. Together, they mean you’re trusting a young company with a lot of access on limited information.

Getting started safely

If you have an invite, a few steps cut most of the risk:

1. Opt out of training first, at app.instinct.com/settings, before you connect anything. The opt-out isn’t retroactive.
2. Put sensitive details in the Vault, which is excluded from training.
3. Connect one account at a time, starting with the one your first task needs.
4. Start with low-stakes errands, such as a restaurant booking, before travel or anything involving large payments.
5. Check what it sent. After the first few tasks, look at the emails and messages it sent for you.

Verdict

Instinct gets the interface right. Texting an assistant that books the train, handles the group dinner and cancels the forgotten subscription is closer to having a human assistant than any app-based agent. Group chats are a real advantage over Muse.

The rest is less certain. It’s invite-only, its future price is unknown, it trains on your data unless you opt out, and it depends on messaging platforms it doesn’t control. If you have an invite, try it on low-stakes errands first and opt out of training. If you don’t, start with Poke or Muse, or see our list of Instinct alternatives.