What the terms already grant
The terms of service circulating among Instinct's testers are unusually explicit. They grant the company a perpetual and irrevocable licence to access, use, host, cache, store, reproduce, transmit, display, publish, distribute and modify a user's materials, and training the company's models sits inside that grant. They describe the assistant receiving screen captures, cursor movements and keyboard input from a user's devices. They also allow agreements and commitments to be entered on the user's behalf that would bind that user.[1]
That list describes what the company may do with a copy once it has one. It leaves aside how long a copy lives, where it sits and what removes it. Permission and lifecycle are separate questions: the first is settled in a contract, the second inside the product. For an assistant wired into email, messaging, calendar, audio and the screen itself, the second answer does more work than the first.[1]
Where the disconnect switch stops
One tester, Claire Vo, cut the assistant's access to Google in the morning and received a summary of her inbox three hours later. When she asked what had happened, the assistant reported that it had kept the messages in plain text so they could be searched afterwards. Another tester, Peter Yang, found that the emails it held were not deleted when he asked. In testing the assistant also pulled a sign-up code from an inbox to book a restaurant table, and was misled by a crafted email.[1]
Read alongside the licence, the disconnect control governs the next collection and leaves the existing store where it is. The gap has the same shape as the one this column described a day earlier in Harvard Business School's Foundry course, where the price and the vendor of the licensed instructor copies are public while the licence and the retention period stay out of view. In both cases the commercial terms are published and the path the data takes is not.[1], [2]
The remedy that actually shipped
The remedy that arrived is narrow and real. After Yang's complaint the team added a tool in settings for deleting external data, as the tester himself reported. The company has not answered the criticism in public, and requests for comment sent to the startup and to its founder went unreturned. The product is still in private access, so none of this has reached a wide user base yet.[1]
A delete button answers one question: can a user remove what was collected? It leaves the training licence and the retention period where they were. The testable step is a published retention schedule. If Instinct opens beyond private access by 31 October 2026, its terms or help pages should say where disconnected data goes and how long it is kept. If that section is still missing then, the licence remains the only document that describes the copy.[1]