A San Francisco Airbnb host is suing The Bot Company, the $2 billion robotics startup founded by ex-Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, for allegedly using his home as a secret robot testing lab. Sean Donovan claims workers booked his Portola neighbourhood property under false pretences in April, posing as remote workers from Thailand. He is seeking $12,383 in damages.

What Donovan found was not a group of digital nomads. Using his outdoor Ring camera, he counted more than 30 people entering and leaving the house over 11 nights. He overheard some of them discussing their “shifts,” he told SFGate.

When Donovan stopped by to take out the trash, he found bundles of wires leading inside. He followed them and discovered a six-foot robot he described as looking like a “borg” from Star Trek, or a giant “Roomba with treads.” The Bot Company builds household chore robots but has shared almost nothing about its prototypes publicly.

The damage was extensive. A 70-year-old family dining table was scratched and water-marked. A Franciscan pottery set went missing. A bathroom tile was chipped, a coffee table banged up, and a broken mug had its handle glued back on. An entire shoe rack disappeared. “They came in and put everything back in a new place,” Donovan told SFGate. “Silverware in a new drawer or a different room.”

Vogt co-founded The Bot Company in 2024 with Paril Jain, the former head of Tesla’s AI division. The startup has raised more than $300 million, including a $150 million round led by Greenoaks. It is valued at approximately $2 billion, despite having revealed almost nothing about what it is building.

Vogt’s previous venture did not end well. He was CEO of Cruise, GM’s robotaxi division, which was shut down in 2024 after a series of safety incidents. GM absorbed the technical team and redirected autonomous driving work toward personal vehicles.

There is a legitimate reason to test household robots in real homes rather than sanitised labs. Domestic environments are cluttered, unpredictable, and full of objects that break. But doing it without the property owner’s consent, under a false identity, crosses a line. The lawsuit alleges unauthorised commercial R&D activity, including robotic prototype testing and filming for commercial purposes.

Other robotics companies testing in real-world environments have faced similar scrutiny. Robotaxi operators have been criticised for using public roads as de facto test tracks. The Bot Company appears to have applied the same logic to someone’s living room, and the result was a trashed house and a rare, accidental glimpse at a prototype the company would rather have kept secret.

Instagram has fixed a scary security flaw that allowed hackers to take over accounts using Meta’s own AI support chatbot. The issue came to light over the weekend, when multiple users on Reddit and X reported that their accounts had been compromised. 

Even my Instagram account got hacked

The password got changed without my knowledge and I was getting different password reset attempts throughout yesterday. And I got repeatedly logged out from the IG iOS app

Quite concerning https://t.co/F6wjKYrlBo

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) June 1, 2026

As reported by TechCrunch, security researcher Jane Wong was also among those affected. “The password got changed without my knowledge, and I was getting different password reset attempts throughout yesterday,” she said. “Quite concerning.”

How did the hack work?

A video posted on X showed the entire process, and it’s alarming in how simple it was. The hacker first used a VPN to spoof the location, bypassing Instagram’s automated account protections. Then, they opened a chat with Meta’s AI Support Assistant and simply asked the bot to add a new email address to the target’s account.

Instagram had an exploit that allowed you to use Meta AI to reset passwords to accounts with no MFA on them. The exploit was patched a short time ago.pic.twitter.com/PEUwLvmllj

— Dark Web Informer (@DarkWebInformer) June 1, 2026

Here’s where it gets wild. The chatbot sent a verification code to the hacker’s email, not the victim’s. The hacker shared the code back with the chatbot, which then offered a button to reset the password. That’s how easy it was to take over the account of anyone on Instagram. 

TechCrunch verified that the hacker’s public email mailbox did receive the verification code, confirming the attack worked exactly as shown.

Is your account at risk?

The scariest part of this attack is that the hacker never needed access to the victim’s real email address at any point. The entire process bypassed the actual account owner completely.

Instagram spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed on Monday that the issue has now been fixed. However, it remains unclear how many users had their accounts compromised before the patch. So, the good news is that you don’t have to worry about this issue anymore.

The state of AI in support

The rising prices of consumer electronics, the growing ease with which fraudsters can deceive people, and the challenges universities face as students use AI to cheat are just some examples of how AI has made our lives worse.

For me, the most annoying application of AI is in support chats. I recently ordered dinner, which was delayed. The AI support chat didn’t let me talk to a human for about two hours, repeatedly telling me that the food would arrive in the next 10 minutes. 

Before this was implemented, any query I had was resolved in minutes by a human customer service agent. Meta’s AI support chatbot is yet another example of how allowing AI in customer service is creating unnecessary stress for users.