Wired says AI agent Instinct won a $550 flight refund
Zoe Schiffer wrote that the agent also cancelled a delayed food order without a refund, costing $64, and that Instinct did not answer questions.
Zoe Schiffer wrote in Wired on Thursday that the AI agent Instinct cancelled a plane ticket and recovered about $550, after spotting that Alaska had moved the flight 90 minutes earlier. The change qualified the fare for a full refund.
Instinct is invite-only and talks to users over iMessage and WhatsApp, connecting to email and calendar accounts, Wired said. The company launched a private beta in February and did not respond to Wired's requests for comment.
The piece also lists failures. Instinct cancelled a delayed DoorDash order without securing a refund, costing $64, Schiffer wrote, after being told to cancel only if a refund was possible. Wired said one venture capitalist reported being banned from Resy after the bot hit its API about 200 times an hour.
Wired said users who disconnected the agent from their email found it had kept a copy of the inbox, and that Instinct's terms let the company use at least some conversations to train its models. Another investor said the agent would be easy to phish.
Instinct is reportedly in talks to raise $1 billion on top of $350 million already raised, at a $10 billion valuation, Wired said, citing The Information. Wired put Muse, Meta's agent, at more than 900,000 downloads and first among free apps in Apple's App Store, citing third-party estimates.