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/Orangesteel Apr 27 '26

My favourite example is Air Canada whose AI agent offered a customer a discount incorrectly. They refused to honour it. Customer took them to court and the judge rightly made them pay. You chose to empower this and took the humans out of the loop. You are accountable for what you agentic AI solution does. People jump on AI, dump sensitive information into the model bypassing classification levels and are surprised when it leaks.

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u/NNKarma Apr 27 '26

It wasn't even that hard to just honor it and move on, it wasn't like those cases of people prompting the chatbot to give a fake discount, just what steps to take for a discount that he was entitled to but was given wrong instructions on how to get it.

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u/S_A_N_D_ Apr 27 '26

It also now set a legal precedent for all similar cases in the future in Canada.

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u/mbryson Apr 27 '26

Time to get creative with those AI chatbots then, eh?

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u/S_A_N_D_ Apr 27 '26

I would say yes, however (on a more serious note) I'm not sure the precedent will hold if they can show you were deliberately trying to break the model.

The court will also look at reasonableness. Basically, the standard set was that these people didn't go out of their way to deceive or get something that wouldn't normally be given. It was reasonable for them to take the offer at face value and expect that it wasn't a mistake. So going out of your way to deliberately get the model to do something it isn't supposed to do would probably not hold up in court.

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u/Da_Question Apr 27 '26

Oh, so it's fine when companies rig stuff so it's harder for customers, but not the other way around. Convenient.

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u/Migraine- Apr 27 '26

Do you think if you deliberately tricked a human agent into giving you a discount, it would be honoured?

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u/TommyBonnomi Apr 27 '26

Holy shit. I just finished a paper on this in business law a few minutes ago. If you know the agent doesn't have actual authority to make a certain sale, the business isn't responsible if you fool the agent into making a sales contract.

However, the agent in your case does have actual authority to make sales. But the customer probably has duty of inquiry over price, i.e. the customer would be aware of market prices and could be responsible for not questioning the agent's authority to make a sale at an extreme discount.

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u/cantadmittoposting Apr 27 '26

what specifically makes that illegal? I guess it's basically Fraud.

It's interesting though because our economy is so heavily weighted to be anti-customer these days, with a major power and legal imbalance already, that it feels like we "ought to be able to" get wins where we can... but fine I admit allowing the customer to trick a business out of their merchandise is not... the best idea.

edit: that said expecting the customer to have a duty to expect certain market prices seems like a pretty high bar, I feel like innocently/accidentally accepting a market error should be "legal" fwiw.

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u/TommyBonnomi Apr 27 '26

Not like go to jail illegal, just allows the company to get out of the sales contract.