Instinct vs Poke

Poke was first shown in September 2025, launched in March 2026, was the first independent agent Apple approved onto Messages for Business, passed 200 million messages, and was bought by Cognition in July. Instinct went from invite-only waitlist to a $2.5 billion valuation in weeks, reaches iMessage by a route Apple does not sanction, and is the product people mean when they say the consumer agent started to feel real. On the rows this directory records they are closer than the reaction to them: both are personal assistants in an iMessage thread, both read your email and calendar and book travel, both train on conversations unless you opt out, and neither publishes who carries its messages or where its model runs.

What the fields say is different is small in number and large in kind.

Before asking, or after. Poke's row says it texts you first; Instinct's says it acts first, and the most-cited complaint about it, "it acted without asking me", is the cost of the row. That is the whole of the difference a user feels: one product drafts and waits for a yes, the other returns a confirmation.

What it is handed to do that. Instinct's policy is the only one here that describes being given your username and password for other services so it can sign in as you, and since 11 September it can hold your authenticator as well. Poke's policy, forty-six thousand characters covering all of its parent's brands, does not say what it takes when you connect an account, so the row is blank. The capability that follows is the one Poke's row lacks: payments, which Instinct does through a wallet that hands it a one-time card, and phone calls out.

Who let it in. Poke is on Apple's programme, on a business number, and Cognition says it stays there through 2026. Instinct reaches iMessage by a route Apple does not sanction and publishes no number at all. That is a regulatory fact rather than a feature, and it cuts both ways: the sanctioned product cannot open a conversation you have not opened, though it can text you first once you have, which is what its row records; the unsanctioned one answers to nobody on that.

What it costs and how you start. Poke publishes three tiers, free, $19 and $199, and takes a signup. Instinct publishes no price, takes an invitation, and a user's own estimate of what it is worth to him is on the market wall at five to ten thousand dollars a month. Poke also reaches WhatsApp and Telegram; Instinct is iMessage only.

What the record holds. The sightings on this site show Instinct doing a specific thing for a named person: talking Verizon down, filing unclaimed-property claims, getting miles for a delay, checking a school portal twice a week, getting a user banned from Resy. None shows Poke doing anything, despite the message count, because the posts that name Poke are about its approval and its acquisition rather than about a chore. The gap between the two products may be persistence, how hard each keeps going before it hands the job back, and this directory has no row for that yet; what it can show is that one product's users post the outcome and the other's posted the milestone.

The thing people ask after "why not Poke" is whether Instinct is OpenClaw for people who will not run a server; that is its own page.