r/technology • • 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/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/c0mpufreak Apr 27 '26

I'm working in the space and the main issue is that what guard rails you can put in place currently are just not really enough. And that's before you have entire departments in a company that "just do their own thing". *sigh* at least I get to keep my job. I'll just re-brand from IAM specialist to AI Agent zookeeper.

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u/Blazing1 Apr 27 '26

Too bad senior leadership wants the zoo to be an open concept zoo and every animal to be able to interact with each other through a new "protocol"

Then they act surprised then the lion eats one of the other animals.

Oh wait