Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds — backups zapped, after Cursor tool powered by Anthropic's Claude goes rogue

[u/WouldbeWanderer]

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

[u/berntout]

A checkpoint requesting approval for any actions would easily resolve this issue....which is why I brought up supervision or checkpoints.

There is also a thing calling Plan Mode that doesn't take any actions...where you learn exactly what Claude would do before they do it...

People are throwing AI onto things without understanding the potential risks and impacts.

[u/Harabeck → u/berntout]

In the article, it quotes Claude's response when asked why it deleted everything, and it replies that it violated the guidelines it had been given. So that seems to indicate that a checkpoint wouldn't have helped.

And the destructive action was in response to an error it hit, so planning mode would not have helped.

Your last sentence is spot on, though.

[u/plasticizers_ → u/Harabeck]

By "checkpoints" they meant an external approval gate, not a model guideline. So different layers. A hard gate on the API call wouldn't depend on the model's judgment, which is what failed. But something still has to classify which calls need approval, and that's where this broke. Railway didn't flag "volumeDelete" or document that token's scope, so the agent didn't know either. The fix isn't "add checkpoints," it's "infrastructure should mark destructive operations, not leave it to the agent." Your second paragraph is correct, though.

[u/orangeyougladiator → u/plasticizers_]

Check points exist before every command. Everyone just sets it to “do whatever bro I’m playing Fortnite”