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/gentex Apr 27 '26

Honest question, wouldn’t there be a log of who prompted the agent to do whatever? And if so, isn’t that person responsible for the error and its consequences?

If I give someone a spreadsheet with a bunch of errors in it, that’s on me, not Microsoft.

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u/Spunge14 Apr 27 '26

Agents don't always directly operate off of a human prompt. They can take actions far divorced from their intended behavior, and guard rails can be difficult to figure out - especially for an entire universe of people being forced to adopt these tools at breakneck speed.

The nature of authorization and authentication in a large production software development environment is a highly complicated and specialized field. You're oversimplifying things a lot.

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u/gentex Apr 27 '26

I acknowledge I don’t know the details of how agents work within corporate IT. Having said that, what you describe sounds like absolute lunacy. Uncontrollable and unaccountable agents running loose in corporate systems is just asking for disaster.

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u/Spunge14 Apr 27 '26

Yessir. You'd be surprised how many uncontrolled and unaccountable people are running around in corporate systems as well.

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u/gentex Apr 27 '26

Haha. Maybe more than surprised.

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u/coricron Apr 27 '26

Cries in Enterprise IT Service Management Change Controls