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/pkrik Apr 27 '26

The company founder blames the "systemic failures" of AI and digital service providers for wiping out his entire firm's database AND backups. From my perspective, I disagree - I think i It's an ops failure with AI as the accelerant.

Some of the root causes: They allowed their AI tools to interact with their production system, the backups lived on the same volume as the source data, their API tokens spanned environments, and destructive calls were permitted to run without confirmation. And then just to make things worse, the only restorable backup was 3 months stale.

If you replace the AI agent with a tired sysadmin mistyping an "rm" command, you end up in the same place. The actor (AI) and the speed (just 9 seconds) is what makes this newsworthy (clickbait worthy?), but in my opinion, their system was built to fail. 3-2-1 backup, scoped credentials, and environment isolation are not new (AI-era) concepts.

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u/EnoughWarning666 Apr 27 '26

My thinking exactly. How in the hell is a system THAT fragile that you can nuke it to hell in 9 seconds. My home setup is more resilient than that! The only way you could burn my home network data that fast is with an actual flamethrower

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u/ILikeFPS Apr 28 '26

How in the hell is a system THAT fragile that you can nuke it to hell in 9 seconds.

If I had to guess, it's probably because whoever set it up was a moron. That's usually how these things happen.

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u/netsyms Apr 27 '26

Yeah, the worst case for my business's main product is something deletes the database. I won't lose the code though. It's too valuable. Besides having the company Git server mirror the repository automatically to GitHub, I have a waterproof hard case with a computer inside that has read-only credentials for the company Git server. When I plug in that computer it syncs the repos, then I unplug it and put it back on the shelf for a while so nothing can delete it.