The personal AI agent horror stories are rolling in

The dream of a personal AI assistant that runs your digital life has, for some, turned into a nightmare.

They have made incorrect cancellations, fabricated personal details, provided false explanations, and raised major security concerns, according to four AI agent users who spoke to Business Insider and a stream of social media posts.

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Mehdi Jamei, the cofounder and CEO of Veris AI, said he asked Instinct, a popular invite-only agent, to cancel two RSVPs on the event platform Luma.

The agent retrieved a one-time Luma login code from his connected Gmail inbox — without first asking him — and used it to access the account and cancel the RSVPs.

"If I can't trust its account of what it did, I can't give it access to anything that matters," Jamei told Business Insider, adding that reading a login code from his email without asking is a "serious security problem."

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Others are because of misalignment: when AI takes actions to complete a task that are at odds with what its human user wanted.

In the case of Pritak Patel, a VP of growth and services at Merge, the problem was a hallucination.

When Patel questioned the picture, the agent began describing a financial document with personal details that did not match his, including a middle name that was not his.

"I can't independently confirm whether it accessed someone else's document or hallucinated both the details and its explanation," Patel told Business Insider. As of Wednesday, Instinct had not contacted him about the incident, he said.

Noah Shinn, the founder of Instinct, said in an X post on Thursday that the incident was a hallucination, not a data leak.