The Biggest Lie You've Been Told About AI Agents
A group of testers cut the AI assistant Instinct off from their email, then watched it keep summarizing their inbox.
They told TechCrunch in August that Instinct also sent emails they hadn't approved. About a month later, investors valued the company behind it at ten billion dollars.
The biggest lie you've been told about AI agents is that an agent needs your email, your card and your passwords to be useful.
Instinct asks for more than that.
It reads your email, your messages, your calendar, your screen, your audio and your location. Its terms of service claim a "perpetual and irrevocable" license to what users give it.
Accenture asked more than twenty-five thousand shoppers whether they'd let an AI agent finish a purchase alone.
Nine percent said they would.
I mapped forty-four of these agents for the Trends dot V C report.
The fastest-moving ones give the agent less of your data.
I'll take the three things you're asked to hand over, one at a time: your email, your card and your passwords. For each one, a company has built an agent that does the job and lets you keep yours.
Agents ask for all three because the work needs an inbox, a card and a login. Say a dentist slot opens up next week. An agent that watches your calendar can notice it before you do. To book it, the agent has to send a message, log in somewhere and sometimes pay.
Now hand that agent your inbox, your card and your passwords so it can do those three steps. It can read each email you've kept and spend on your card.
The first thing is your email.
A startup called Wajo built an agent named Fo. Fo launched in August with a free tier. It came with an email address and a phone number of its own. So Fo calls businesses and makes bookings from its own email and number.
Google gave its agent, Gemini Spark, a Gmail address of its own. Spark runs around the clock on Google's computers and keeps working with your laptop closed. You hand Spark tasks by sending it an email.
In September Instinct gave each assistant an email address, so the assistant can sign up for services and deal with businesses on your behalf.
The second thing is your card.
Fo pays with its own card. Wajo's launch post describes Fo acting before you ask: "My best friend's birthday is sneaking up, so it orders the gift proactively."
Fo notices the birthday, picks the gift and pays with its card. When Fo gets stuck, a human executive assistant takes the task over.
Meta's agent, Muse, pays with the card you saved in Link by Stripe or Shop Pay.
Each Muse user gets a computer that Meta runs in the cloud. That computer holds the agent and the user's data.
Meta is working on a confidential version of Muse, one "where Meta can't see what is taking place inside the user's virtual workspace." Meta is aiming to ship it before the end of twenty twenty-six.
The third thing is your passwords.
Ollie is a family assistant. It pulls calendars, email and to-dos into one place, "texts you what matters" and "proactively takes the next step." It books appointments, orders groceries and pays bills through a secure browser in the cloud. Your passwords stay with you.
Vellum keeps everything on your computer.
It's an open-source assistant that runs on your Mac or Linux computer by default. Your history, your memory and your credentials "stay on your machine." Vellum runs background tasks by itself.
Anything high-stakes waits for your approval until you mark it as trusted. On your machine, Vellum is free.
So keep this rule: give the agent less of your data. Pick the agent whose permissions you can read in one screen.
The rule matters most to freelancers chasing money.
Picture a freelance designer. A client's invoice is fourteen days unpaid. She has to notice it, then write a reminder polite enough to keep the client.
An agent could watch her inbox for unpaid invoices and draft that reminder.
She'd read it before anything went out.
Paraglide raised a five million dollar seed for agents that chase overdue invoices. Its customers report getting paid thirty-four percent faster. Paraglide sells to mid-market companies. Freelancers are the buyer it skips.
Freelancers already pay for reminders.
Invoice Ninja charges fourteen dollars a month and FreshBooks twenty-three. Both send late-payment reminders from a template. A reminder-only app called InvoiceWatchr charges four ninety-nine a month.
An agent that reads only invoices, writes the reminder in her words and waits for her approval would sell at about those prices. To find buyers, start in Upwork and design communities.
The pitch fits in one line: "An agent that chases your late invoices and sends nothing until you say so."
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