AI agents compared: Instinct, Muse and Dots each get a cloud computer

Allison Johnson at The Verge spent time with three consumer AI agents and ranked them by how much they intrude. Instinct came out least intrusive and most useful day to day, Muse smoothest for shopping and desktop work, and Dots, in her description, work software that will order a burrito.

“Each dot gets its own cloud computer and browser and connects to more than 4,000 apps through plugins”

— The Verge, Обзор от 9 октября 2026

The shared architecture is the news

Each AI agent here rents a machine on the user's behalf. Instinct runs a persistent cloud computer, so a multi-day job carries on between messages. Meta gives each Muse user an isolated virtual machine watched by a monitoring system it calls Sentinel. OpenAI gives every dot its own cloud computer and browser.

A consumer product that rents a machine, holds credentials and drives a browser is the same primitive we counted on 7 October, when researchers logged a fleet of 14 parallel agents running against a mapping API and nobody could say who operated them.

What each costs and where it works

Instinct is free in an invite-only private beta from Spear Street Technology, founded by Noah Shinn at 23. Meta's Muse launched on 8 September in the US alone, across iOS, Android, web and WhatsApp, with a free tier and plans at $20 and $100 a month. OpenAI shipped Dots on 3 October at no extra cost inside ChatGPT Pro and Business Premium.

Dots is unavailable to Pro users in the EU, Switzerland and the UK. We wrote on 7 October about OpenAI switching its textGrain watermark on for the EU and nowhere else. The same company gave Europe the disclosure obligation and withheld the agent, inside the same week.

The capability three of the four refuse

Instinct, Muse and Dots cannot place outbound business calls. Meta tested it in beta and did not ship it. Wajo, a free fourth option from founder Shivani Poddar, does make calls and asks for approval on decisions it judges important.

A call creates a record with a person on the other end who did not consent to talk to software. Three of the four stopped short of it, and the smallest did not.

What the safety controls actually cover

Muse routes payments through one-time-use cards issued via Stripe and leans on Stripe's warranties. Dots applies custom approval rules and an auto-review step for anything touching accounts. Instinct added a deletion tool after privacy complaints.

Each of those protects a different thing: money, account changes, stored history. None of them covers what the agent does with the access it already holds between approvals, and that window is where most of the work happens.

Informational material, not investment advice. Availability and pricing described here are the vendors' own at the time of writing and differ by country.