Instinct AI: What Its Terms Let It Do With Your Data
Instinct spent the past week as the most screenshotted product on tech Twitter. Jason Shuman of Primary VC called it “as close to THE personal AI assistant we’ve all been waiting for.” Sheel Mohnot described it as “OpenClaw for normal people” and said he was setting his dad up with it. The demos are genuinely good: you text it, it calls you back, it books the handyman.
The page nobody screenshotted is its terms of service, last revised on August 17, 2026. It deserves a read before you hand an always-on agent your screen.
What Instinct is
Instinct is built by Spear Street Technology, Inc. in San Francisco and is currently invite-only while the company scales up compute. Its own description of the product:
It connects to your applications and devices - email, messaging, screen, audio, location, and more. The interface is simple: there are no new interfaces. It’s trained to use a phone and a computer.
And, one sentence later:
Instinct’s core model is trained to understand and handle the deeply personal nuances of everyday life.
That is the homepage saying the model is trained on the nuances of everyday life. The terms of service are where you find out whose.
The license in Section 3
Here is the grant, verbatim:
You grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide, perpetual and irrevocable license to access, use, host, cache, store, reproduce, transmit, display, publish, distribute, and modify any Materials as needed to provide, develop, train, fine-tune, and improve upon our technologies, products and services, including the Services, and to otherwise permit access to or disclose your Materials to third parties as needed to accomplish the foregoing or as necessary to comply with our legal obligations.
Take the adjectives one at a time. Perpetual and irrevocable means there is no expiry and no take-back: deleting your account does not end the license. Transferable and sub-licensable means the rights can be handed to another company, including whoever eventually buys Spear Street Technology. Publish and distribute are listed explicitly. And the stated purpose is not only to run the product but to “develop, train, fine-tune, and improve upon” the models.
Plenty of AI products take a license to process your content, and some form of this clause is ordinary. What is not ordinary is the combination: irrevocable, sub-licensable, explicitly for training, over a data set this wide.
Two grants in one document that don’t agree
Section 6 contains a second license grant covering “Your Content,” with almost the same list of verbs, and ends this way:
You agree that these rights and licenses are royalty free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide, perpetual and irrevocable (for so long as Your Content is stored with us).
That parenthetical is a real limit. Section 3 has no equivalent. So when you close your account, does the license over your screen captures end because Section 6 ties it to storage, or continue because Section 3 doesn’t? The document does not resolve it, and Section 3 is the one that names training.
”Materials” means your screen, your cursor, and your keyboard
Section 3 defines what it is taking a license to:
prompts, text, documents, device usage data (including screen captures, cursor movements, and keyboard inputs) or other materials and data for processing
Its privacy notice, last revised July 22, 2026, describes the same collection in plainer language:
To effectively perform its duties, the personal assistant is always on and has access to any interaction you take when the personal assistant is engaged. This includes the content of your screen and software application that you are interacting with, all text and documents that you transmit, and other text or data that is made available to us through your operating system, screen captures, or otherwise. This also includes the content of messages, emails, or other private communications or materials that you view.
The clause worth sitting with is the last one: messages and emails that you view. Not what you forward to the assistant, not what you ask it about. Whatever is on your screen while it is running, including the other half of a conversation with someone who never agreed to anything.
The notice goes further on what it expects to end up holding: payment information, “your username and password for third-party accounts so that the personal assistant can sign into these accounts on your behalf,” and health information from things like medical appointments and messages from your doctor. Separately, it collects “clickstream information (keystrokes, clicks, cursor positions, how much time is spent on the page)” and precise geolocation, and says that usage data is used “to evaluate, fine-tune and train the AI models that power our products and technology.”
The Google carve-out is Google’s rule, not Instinct’s promise
To Instinct’s credit, one exclusion is stated clearly:
we do not use information received directly from Google Workspace to evaluate, fine-tune, train, or improve AI models
That is real, and it matters if your working life runs on Gmail. But notice why it exists. The same section commits Instinct to the Google API Services User Data Policy “including the Limited Use requirements,” which is the rule that forbids training on Workspace data in the first place. It is a condition of holding the OAuth scopes, not a company-wide position on training.
And it is Google-shaped. There is no matching sentence for Outlook or Microsoft 365, for iMessage, Slack, WhatsApp, or Signal, for your screen captures, your audio, your location, or your keystrokes. Everything outside Google Workspace falls back to the general rule stated two paragraphs earlier: used to “evaluate, fine-tune, and train the AI models.” If you are on the Microsoft side, there is no carve-out for you at all.
Advertising, business partners, and “any purpose”
Three more lines from the privacy notice that have not made it into the Twitter threads.
The list of things Instinct uses your information for includes generating “personalized suggestions based on the context of your interactions and prior experience with the Services (including personalized advertising).”
The disclosure list includes “Third party business partners who may use the information for their own purposes,” on an aggregate or anonymized basis. The very next sentence says Workspace data is excluded from that. Which tells you the sentence has teeth for everything that isn’t Workspace data.
And on de-identified data: “we may use deidentified information for any purpose.”
The ceiling is one hundred dollars
THE COMPANY ENTITIES’ TOTAL LIABILITY TO YOU FOR ANY DAMAGES FINALLY AWARDED SHALL NOT EXCEED ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS ($100.00).
Section 9 sends disputes to binding individual arbitration under JAMS rules and waives class actions, with a 30-day window to opt out by writing to Instinct. Liability caps and arbitration clauses are standard in consumer software and are not scandalous on their own. They land differently attached to a product that holds your third-party passwords and can spend money on your behalf.
Instinct names those risks itself, in the data security section:
These risks include, but are not limited to, unintended actions (including unintended payments and communications to outside parties), incorrect or incomplete outputs, increased privacy risks due to access to potentially sensitive information, and disclosure of information (including potentially sensitive information) to third parties.
Two other absences are worth noting. The privacy notice has no section on California or EU privacy rights, unusual for a San Francisco company that restricts its service to US residents. And the only deletion route it describes is for data collected from Google Workspace. There is no stated path to delete the screen captures.
The screenshots may themselves be the problem
One more line from Section 3, about beta access:
During the period when the Services are offered on a test basis, you must maintain the confidentiality of all Outputs, and may not post, distribute, display or otherwise make available any Outputs for any purpose.
Instinct is invite-only and openly still in testing. Read literally, every viral screenshot of an Instinct output is the thing its own terms prohibit.
What Carly does instead
Carly is an AI executive assistant for email, calendar, and scheduling that runs across both Gmail and Outlook. The relevant difference is not a marketing claim, it is what the legal documents say.
No training, on either side of the house. Section 7 of Carly’s privacy notice reads: “We do not use your data, including Google and Microsoft data, or any personal information to train or develop artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) models.” And on the vendors underneath: “Under our contractual terms with our AI model providers, user data cannot be retained or used to train their AI models.” That covers Microsoft too, which is where Instinct’s carve-out stops.
No perpetual license over your content. Carly’s terms contain no grant of a perpetual, irrevocable, sub-licensable license over what you put into the product. There is nothing to survive your account deletion because nothing was granted.
Scoped access you turn on one piece at a time. Calendar, contacts, and email permissions are granted separately and revoked separately. For core scheduling, Carly reads a thread when you copy it in, and you end that access by taking it off the thread. Drive access is optional and off unless you turn it on. Nothing is “always on,” because Carly is not sitting on your desktop watching the screen. It works from the accounts you connect at carlyassistant.com/integrations, and it stops the moment you disconnect them.
No screen capture, no keystrokes, no location. Carly does not read your cursor movements or your keyboard inputs, and it does not see the private messages of people who never signed up for anything.
A liability cap tied to what you actually paid, in the twelve months before a claim, rather than a hundred dollars.
What you get for that is the boring, valuable half of the job: Carly triages the inbox, drafts and sends replies in your voice, schedules and reschedules across time zones, runs free booking pages and group availability polls, briefs you before meetings from your own calendar and inbox, and chains it all into automations. Free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month. Connecting Carly to ChatGPT or Claude through carlyassistant.com/mcp is free.
If you want the wider field first, here are the best AI personal assistants, the best AI assistants for Gmail, and the best AI assistant for Outlook email.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Instinct AI train on your data?
Yes, with one exception. Instinct’s terms grant it a license to use your Materials to “develop, train, fine-tune, and improve upon” its technologies, and its privacy notice says usage data is used “to evaluate, fine-tune and train the AI models.” Data received directly from Google Workspace is excluded, because Google’s Limited Use policy requires that. Nothing else is excluded, including Microsoft data, screen captures, keystrokes, audio, and location.
Can you revoke Instinct’s license to your data?
The license in Section 3 is described as “perpetual and irrevocable” with no stated end. A second grant in Section 6 is qualified with “for so long as Your Content is stored with us.” The two do not agree, and the terms do not say which controls after you delete your account. You can revoke Instinct’s access to Google Workspace and request deletion of Workspace data specifically.
What does Instinct AI actually see?
Per its privacy notice: the content of your screen and the application you are using, all text and documents you transmit, data available through your operating system, screen captures, and the content of messages, emails, and other private communications you view. Optionally audio and voice, and precise geolocation. It also collects keystrokes, clicks, and cursor positions, and may hold third-party passwords and payment details you give it.
Is Instinct AI safe to use for work?
That depends on what your employer’s data policy allows, and it is a question to take to them rather than to a blog post. The specific facts to bring: an always-on agent that captures the screen, a training license over everything outside Google Workspace, disclosure to third-party business partners, and a $100 liability cap under binding arbitration.
How is Carly different from Instinct?
Carly commits in writing to never training on your data, including Microsoft data, and passes that commitment through to its model providers. It takes no perpetual license over your content, uses scoped permissions you can revoke individually, and never captures your screen, keystrokes, or location. It is a working assistant for email, calendar, and scheduling rather than an always-on observer of your device.
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Now Carly reaches out to candidates, shares my real-time availability, lets them pick a slot, then sends a Zoom link and drops it straight into my calendar. She sends reminders to both of us before each call, which has significantly reduced no-shows and last-minute confusion.
On top of scheduling, Carly acts like a full executive assistant, sending me my schedule the night before so I can prepare for each call. It reminds me of the old x.ai assistant, but Carly is noticeably smarter, faster, and better suited to my healthcare recruitment business."
