You put in a prompt, get an answer, and nothing happens until you input another. That’s how most AI assistants have worked, but proactive AI changes that.

Proactive AI doesn’t need a prompt to act. It’ll check you in for a flight or submit an application on your behalf, making these decisions based on context it has accumulated over time. With proactive AI assistants like Meta’s Muse and Instinct going viral, the stuff of sci-fi suddenly seems close to reality.

But just like any good sci-fi story, this technology is a double-edged sword. Let’s explore how proactive AI works and what you give up for the convenience it provides.

To find out more about what’s at stake, check out our full guide on AI and privacy — or try out our AI paper trail tool to see exactly what mainstream AI chatbots may have collected about you through your conversations.

What makes an AI proactive

Proactive AI agents run on the same large language models as the AI chatbots we’re used to. What sets them apart are these three things that work together: 

  1. They are always watching: Instead of waiting to be prompted, proactive agents monitor a set of sources and pick up on changes as they happen.
  2. They have persistent memory: Proactive agents build a working model of your habits and preferences over time. That’s what lets them anticipate what you’re likely to need next, not just recall a fact when you ask for it.
  3. They decide how and whether to act: Proactive agents can “reason”. They weigh a situation against your habits, judge whether it’s worth acting on, and decide how far it should go before checking in with you.

Proactive AI combines automation with judgment. Where a simple automation fires every time a condition is met, proactive agents anticipate your needs and determine if an action is useful before choosing to act.

That can be helpful, but it can also lead to unintended consequences. Instinct, for example, was purchasing something for a user, but when it was obstructed by a login wall, it simply reset the user’s password(새 창) without asking. This kind of initiative makes proactive AI agents impressive but also risky.

Use cases for proactive AI agents

Proactive agents can be helpful for the kind of tasks you’d normally either forget about or waste an evening on. Here are some examples:

Keeping travel plans sorted

A proactive agent can watch your travel itinerary for changes. If a flight is rescheduled and puts your connection at risk, it catches it and flags it to you. It can potentially rebook your flights to keep your travel plans running smoothly.

Grabbing the thing you’d otherwise miss

The same watching-and-waiting can work for anything in short supply, such as a pair of shoes sold out in your size. The agent keeps watching and places an order the moment a restock happens.

Following up on an email 

Proactive agents can monitor your inbox for emails you’re expecting. If your email to a customer service representative hasn’t been replied to, an agent could notice it, write a nudge, and either send it or leave it ready for you to send.

Trimming subscriptions 

With almost everything paid for by subscription these days, a proactive agent could audit your usage and cancel your subscriptions for services you pay for and don’t use regularly. 

Monitoring business operations

In business, proactive agents could monitor IT infrastructure to catch early signs of trouble and trigger a fix before things go awry. It can also monitor deals and keep them from going cold by proactively engaging leads when your team might otherwise be bogged down.

The difference between proactive AI and reactive AI

A reactive AI assistant, like ChatGPT, only moves when you tell it to. Even the ones with memory still sit idle between prompts, holding onto what you’ve told them until you ask something else. Proactive AI removes that waiting. It watches for a trigger and decides on its own whether to act. 

In other words, reactive AI is something you operate. Proactive AI operates on your behalf, taking over your agency.

The convenience of proactive agents comes with a cost

To be able to do what it does, proactive AI agents need constant access to your accounts. That’s a different kind of risk than the one that comes with using an AI assistant.

You’re giving one company complete access to all your data 

We’re wary of the amount of data Google collects, but even they don’t have complete access to all your private information. Google could have your location data(새 창), but your health data is stored on Apple Health. Your streaming preferences are tucked away on Netflix, and your finances on your banking app.

Using proactive AI agents means handing all of that, and more, to a single company. These agents are designed to connect all of your data; that’s what lets them notice patterns and act. Depending on the agent, that can include the usernames and passwords for your third-party accounts, your payment details, and more.

Muse shows how data-hungry proactive agents can be. A WIRED(새 창) reviewer found that Muse seemed more interested in collecting data than in completing tasks, repeatedly suggesting he connect more and more services. That behavior tracks with what we know about Meta’s track record.

The cost of that convenience is that everything about you is now in the hands of one company. And unless they go through independent audits, you have no real way to know if your data is being managed securely. If your account is breached or sold, third parties you never consented to now have complete insight into where you were, who you talked to, what you bought, and what you said in private. That opens the door to becoming a victim of threats like identity theft and targeted scams.

Disconnecting isn’t the same as deleting

TechCrunch(새 창) reported that screenshots of Instinct’s terms showed a “perpetual and irrevocable” license over users’ data. Instinct has since revised it, and the current terms of service and privacy policy don’t include that language.

The new terms still matter, though. Instinct’s current (at the time of writing) terms let it “access, copy, collect, and index data(새 창)” from the services you connect, and both the terms and its privacy policy say that disconnecting an account doesn’t delete your data(새 창) unless you ask. An early user(새 창) said she disconnected Instinct’s access to her Google account and still received a summary of her latest emails a few hours later. When she asked why, Instinct confirmed it had stored her emails in plain text for later searches. If you disconnect your services from Instinct, be sure to request data deletion too.

Opting out of AI training on Instinct also comes with a catch — it only “applies on a go-forward basis(새 창).” So whatever data the model has absorbed about you will remain as part of its training and knowledge. Muse works differently; opting out of AI training retroactively applies to past interactions(새 창). However, deleting data from Muse doesn’t mean your data is removed. Meta says that the model could still remember what you deleted(새 창), and its “forget” feature works on a best-effort basis(새 창).

Agent mistakes are real, not just wrong

When a chatbot like Gemini hallucinates, it only causes real harm(새 창) if you act on that information. When a proactive agent makes a mistake, you may not even know about it until you face real-world consequences. 

Imagine if a proactive agent decides to book you on first-class seats for your trip. You’re now on the hook for a bill you never agreed to. When you agree to Instinct’s terms, for example, you grant authority to enter binding agreements on your behalf(새 창) — it can commit your money without your sign-off, and you can’t legally claim it went rogue. Worse still, it says that any confirmation safeguards(새 창) aren’t guaranteed to prevent unintended actions.

This isn’t unique to Instinct. SpaceXAI’s proactive agent, Grok Bot, has similar terms. Action approvals are “aids only(새 창)” and may not prevent unintended action. Likewise, any liability arising from the AI agent’s actions falls entirely on you(새 창). Meta’s terms for using Muse make you solely responsible(새 창) for everything its agent does. This paints a pretty clear pattern: the agents’ actions are yours.

It can be tricked into working against you

Proactive agents can autonomously make decisions, but when they cannot tell your instructions apart from text planted by someone else and don’t confirm an action with you, they can be easily tricked. One Instinct user(새 창) found that the proactive agent fell for a prompt injection attack — it followed malicious instructions the user sent himself. Scammers don’t need to hack the agent; they just need it to read something they wrote and let it act on that.

In fact, Instinct(새 창), Meta(새 창), SpaceXAI(새 창), and OpenClaw(새 창) all acknowledge prompt injection as a known threat. None currently offer complete protection against these attacks, promising at most that the agent’s defenses work to reduce this risk.

Be aware of what you hand over

Proactive AI works because of how much data you give it. The more it knows about you, the more it can do for you, but the bigger the record of your life that sits with one company.

An industry pattern has emerged. These assistants can train on your most personal data unless you opt out, and cutting them off doesn’t reliably wipe what they’ve already collected. And when an agent does something you didn’t intend, the terms put the consequences on you, not the company. To their credit, the companies spell all of this out. But being upfront doesn’t cancel out your right to data privacy.

It’s ultimately up to you to decide whether this type of convenience is worth your privacy and data security. But before you say yes, know what an assistant can actually see, what it’s allowed to do without asking you first, and whether you can really get your data back once it’s in. Make sure it’s a decision you actually made, not one you gave away because something went viral.

If you’d rather not make that trade at all, turn to our AI assistant Lumo instead. We’ve built it the other way around — no logs, no training on your data, nothing kept longer than you want it. You lose a bit of the proactive AI magic, but you keep the thing it asks you to give up: control over your life.