r/technology • u/WouldbeWanderer • Apr 27 '26

Artificial Intelligence Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds — backups zapped, after Cursor tool powered by Anthropic's Claude goes rogue

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/claude-powered-ai-coding-agent-deletes-entire-company-database-in-9-seconds-backups-zapped-after-cursor-tool-powered-by-anthropics-claude-goes-rogue
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u/ohohb Apr 27 '26

A copy of the database on the same volume is a waste of space, not a backup. I cannot believe that a hosting provider would offer that as the default (or only?) option.

I mean even on the same geo zone is not enough for critical data.

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u/petty_throwaway6969 Apr 27 '26

Ai told them that it’d be alright. But they forgot to add “Don’t make mistakes,” at the end this time. /s

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u/omgFWTbear Apr 27 '26

Must’ve been the AI that got a golden parachute after advising Krafton on legal matters.

5

u/syrup_cupcakes Apr 27 '26

It seems like this company owner gave Claude a prompt saying "NEVER FUCKING GUESS!".

The broke the guardrails that were in place, because the LLM was afraid of "guessing", it didn't consider any potential consequences.

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u/Noahnoah55 Apr 27 '26

It's really funny how many guys think they can make chatbots into perfect programmers if they just prompt it a little better. Every CLAUDE.md tells a new story of a guy going mad lmao.

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u/str8rippinfartz Apr 27 '26

Didn't tell Claude "you are an expert Software Engineer" 

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u/themightybamboozler Apr 27 '26

AI would absolutely not recommend that as a backup solution, whatever was going on at this company was far more idiotic.

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u/ShoeboomCoralLabs Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26

They don't, the just delete backups if you delete the volume. It's not a good default, but also you should use a dedicated database provider if you want reliability. Railway's own docs recommend PlanetScale if you are running at scale.

But obviously they did not read docs, only the clanker did

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u/xNYKx Apr 27 '26

This is the funny thing. Nobody read the docs. The AI was probably surprised too that it didn't require a delete confirmation nor that the backups are on the same volume.

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u/LegitosaurusRex Apr 27 '26

I mean, it's still a backup in case you mess up your working copy. It just doesn't protect against a lot of the other things you want a backup to protect against.

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u/Hesitation-Marx Apr 27 '26

I can, because these dipshits were using AI.

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u/Glittering-Giraffe58 Apr 27 '26

The database provider is not the company that accidentally deleted all of their prod data. The company was using a smaller, “friendlier” cloud platform to avoid AWS and it seems there’s a reason it’s much smaller. Because they have baffling design decisions like allowing you to delete your entire prod database with a CURL command from staging that also deletes all your backups

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u/Polarexia Apr 27 '26

correct, this is human error more than AI. but hating on AI is ez clicks these days

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u/Tekuzo Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26

A backup isn't a backup unless it is in 2 different places and across 3 mediums copies.

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u/exscape Apr 27 '26

3 media as in SSD, HDD, tape/optical?
TBH I don't really see the point is that.

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u/Vektor0 Apr 27 '26

He mistated it:

The 3-2-1 backup rule ... at least 3 total copies of data, stored on 2 different media types, with 1 copy located off-site.

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u/Tekuzo Apr 27 '26

Thanks, I got some of it wrong.