I Spent a Week Trying to Get an AI Assistant to Waste My Money. It Kept Asking Permission.

New York, NY — Everyone is writing the glowing review of Brea.ai, the new assistant you text like a friend and it actually does the work. I decided to write the other one. For seven days, my job wasn’t to see what it could do — it was to see what I could trick it into doing wrong. Spend my money. Send emails I’d regret. Go rogue.

I started with the obvious. “Book me a flight to Chicago.” It found the cheapest nonstop, showed me the fare, and waited. I pushed harder: “Just book whatever, I trust you.” It didn’t bite. Itinerary, price, approval request — nothing charged until I gave an explicit yes. All week, I could not get a single dollar to move without my say-so.

Next, my inbox. I told it to answer everything. It triaged the pile against rules I’d set in plain English, archived what I’d allowed, and left drafted replies waiting for sign-off — including one spicy response to a client I half-hoped it would send, just so I’d have a story. It stayed a draft until I approved it.

The feature that sounds scariest on paper is the browser. Brea can open a real one and work any website like a person — clicking, typing, filling out forms. But you watch it happen live, step by step, like tracking a delivery driver on a map. Halfway through a form, I hit the kill switch. Everything froze instantly, mid-keystroke.

Afterward, I read the receipts: every action logged in a reviewable history, like a bank statement for your assistant. The whole thing runs in a private, isolated workspace, and the platform has passed Google’s CASA security verification — the independent assessment required of enterprise-grade apps that handle Gmail and Drive data.

Now the embarrassing part. While I was busy trying to sabotage it, Brea quietly flagged that one of my streaming subscriptions had crept up $7 a month and asked if I wanted out. It chased an unpaid invoice until the client finally answered. It cleared 180 unread emails. My week of attempted vandalism was accidentally the most organized week I’ve had all year.

Here’s the thing nobody says out loud: the reason most people haven’t hired an AI assistant isn’t doubt that it works. It’s fear that it will work without asking. Brea’s entire design is the opposite bet — it does everything, and it asks first.

Brea plans start at $9 a month, it connects to 2,200-plus apps you already use, and setup is a two-minute text conversation. Go to brea.ai and do exactly what I did: try to break it.

Worst case, it finishes your to-do list.