This VC used AI to try to snag a restaurant reservation. Resy wasn't having it

AI agents can do lots of tasks. Landing you a table at one of New York's trendiest restaurants might not be one.

Instinct, which is an invite-only service at the moment, communicates with users via text. The bet was that Instinct could check for open tables at 4 Charles much more frequently than Bahr-de Stefano — or any other human — could manually.

Instead of getting him a ticket to some prime rib or an egg-topped burger, though, Bahr-de Stefano's AI agent spammed Resy's website so much that the platform temporarily shut down his account.

Agents might appear to understand their objective, though exactly how they carry it out — and whether the strategy they pick might have unintended consequences — is often an afterthought.

Users can find restaurants and make reservations through Resy's integrations with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, the spokesperson said. The company declined to comment specifically on Bahr-de Stefano's case.

Bahr-de Stefano noticed the Resy issue on Sunday when he couldn't get into his account. In his email inbox, there was a message from the American Express-owned reservation platform saying that his account had "displayed behavior in violation of Resy's Terms of Service."

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He got details about what went wrong after checking Instinct's activity log. Unbeknownst to Bahr-de Stefano, the AI agent had been sending Resy about 200 API requests per hour. That included checking the restaurant's availability through Resy every 10 minutes throughout the day, as well as looking every 0.4 seconds around the time that reservations usually dropped each morning.

Bahr-de Stefano wrote back to Resy, laying out how he had used the AI agent. The log made clear why his account had been flagged, he said.

On Tuesday, an email from Resy informed him that the company had reinstated his account.

The tool has worked well in other cases, such as finding an appointment at an otherwise booked-up doctor's office and deciding which attractions to visit in Paris during a trip, Bahr-de Stefano said.

The VC said that he plans to continue using Instinct, though with some adjustments. Instead of simply giving the AI agent a simple prompt, he said, he'll now set parameters on how the agent tackles the task, such as how often it pings a website looking for reservations.