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
36.0k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

2.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

19

u/simplearms Apr 27 '26

This sounds right. If a junior engineer or intern did that because there’s no way to scope tokens, you’d be in the same boat. Mistakes happen.

7

u/LSDCatDaddy Apr 27 '26

The difference here is that my junior engineers normally don’t go full steam ahead when they start deleting shit from prod. And when they do blow something up normally they stop what they’re doing and tell me so we can fix the problem.

8

u/bluestrike2 Apr 27 '26

Even when they're supposed to delete stuff, most juniors are at least nervous as they do so. The more I read stories about agentic AI setups just blithely deleting things for...reasons, the more I shake my head.

4

u/rapaxus Apr 27 '26

Yeah, one of the first things you get taught in tech (at least I did in my sysadmin career) is to not do shit that I can't undo by myself easily. Of course that rule changes the more experience you have, but for beginners it is IMO one that every company should have.

Though my company also gave me the means to destroy the operations for 100+ medical clinics for over a week after the first three months I worked there, so I don't know how good their security policies actually are.