Competition between startups and big tech companies over personal AI agents is intensifying, and OpenAI is expected to join the race soon, Axios reported on Saturday.

OpenAI earlier this year hired a developer of OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent tool that gained popularity among AI power users, and tasked the hire with building a next-generation personal agent.

Instinct provides functions that access users’ email, messages, screens, voice and location data to send texts first or make calls. Instinct recently added its own email address and phone-calling functions. It is also in talks to raise funds at a valuation of $10 billion.

SpaceXAI, led by Elon Musk (일론 머스크), released Grok Bot in August. The Grok Bot agent gets a dedicated cloud computer for each user and can log into user apps and work around the clock.

Meta in September also launched Muse, a personal AI agent closely integrated with its services. Apple also revamped its voice assistant Siri around AI.

Axios described the personal AI agent race as a battle for personal data. Frontier AI competition has focused on intelligence levels, but personal AI agents need to go deep into users’ daily lives and prove their usefulness to secure sustainability. That means the more an agent knows about a user’s relationships, schedule and spending, the more useful it becomes.

If a company captures the spot as a user’s default agent, it secures the most valuable relationship in consumer-facing technology. Users are far more likely to share information with an AI that manages their lives than with a search engine, Axios said.

It is still unclear how much consumers will pay for convenience and how much personal information they will give up. Apple said it would set usage limits on some server-based Apple Intelligence functions, including an upgraded version of Siri. Expanding the limits could be linked to iCloud plans. Meta offers Muse under free and paid tiers.