Early Users Are Deleting Their AI Agents -- AI Brief October 7

Good day %%first_name%%. People are deleting the personal AI agents they just installed, Anthropic is handing startups a free year of Claude, and Google cut its image-model prices in half. We also get a plain-English tour of Codemode, and Google Cloud’s pitch to haul your mainframe into the sky. Let’s get into it.

Early Users Are Deleting Their AI Agents Business Insider

* What happened: Business Insider talked to four early adopters of Meta’s Muse and a startup agent called Instinct who deleted or restricted the tools, with dozens more raising the same worries on social media. The triggers were privacy scares and blunders: agents reading one-time login codes out of Gmail without asking, making up personal details from a document nobody sent, and setting off a carrier-account login prompt that appeared to come from Iran.

* Why it matters: A personal agent only works if you hand it your inbox, calendar and payment methods. Scott Persinger, CTO of travel platform BizTrip, put the stakes plainly: “Access to email is everything — via password resets you could probably access my whole life.” Sunday’s brief covered Muse profiling your friends, and this is the user-side reaction.

* What everyone’s saying: Growth is still pointed up. The Information reports Muse has more than 3 million weekly users, and Instinct’s founder says his invite-only service is growing roughly 10% a day. Meta says Muse has “first-of-its-kind privacy, safety, and security protections” and asks before big actions like purchases. Instinct didn’t respond to Business Insider. YieldClub’s CEO called it “the wild west.”

* My read between the lines: Look at who’s leaving. These are founders and CTOs, the people who most want agents to work, and they’re still trimming the permissions. The ones who keep using the tools are withholding passwords and skipping the inbox. Right now the product is “agent with the access turned down,” which is a long way from the pitch.

📖 Further reading: A Stranger Sent Me an Invite to an AI Nobody Has Written About — my deep-dive on Instinct, the invite-only agent at the center of this story.

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Anthropic Hands Startups a Free Year CNBC

* What happened: On Tuesday Anthropic expanded its Claude Startups program, which launched in May and, per Anthropic, already has thousands of companies in it. TechCrunch reports members get a free year of Claude Team with up to five premium seats, a one-time $1,000 in API credits, access to the Claude Marketplace and virtual office hours with Anthropic’s applied AI team. Companies founded in the last five years or funded in the last two can apply.

* Why it matters: Startups pick their tools early, and whatever they build on at the start tends to be what the product runs on later. Free seats and credits are how a vendor gets into a company before that company has a budget. If you’re a founder, this is real money off for the first year.

* What everyone’s saying: CNBC frames it as Anthropic deepening ties with founders while it fends off OpenAI and Google, which both run their own startup programs, and as it gears up for what CNBC calls a widely expected blockbuster IPO. CNBC also notes the vast majority of Anthropic’s revenue comes from business customers.

* My read between the lines: The headline number is “up to $45,000” in discounts and credits through the Claude Startup Stack, which Anthropic describes as benefits for the tools a startup runs on. The part that is clearly Anthropic’s own is the $1,000 and the seats. Both sides want the first year to feel generous and the second year to feel like habit.

📖 Further reading: Claude for Small Business Just Hired You 44 Employees. You Only Need Four of Them. — my paid look at what Anthropic is building for small companies, which is the crowd this program courts.

The daily Brief is free and always will be. The paywalled deep-dives are where I stay with one story long enough to be useful, like my dive on Instinct, the invite-only agent in today’s lead. Members get those plus the full archive. Become a member →

Nano Banana 2.1 Costs Half as Much The Decoder

* What happened: Google released Nano Banana 2.1, a new image generation and editing model built on Gemini 3.6 Flash, on Tuesday. A 1K image drops from 6.70 cents t