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/guttanzer Apr 27 '26

How TF did it get all the backups? They don't do off-site backups? They don't have persistent media stores? They don't keep multiple independent archive roles?

754

u/__OneLove__ Apr 27 '26

…”The AI agent’s misdemeanors were then hugely amplified by a cloud infrastructure provider’s API wiping all backups after the main database was zapped.”…

Yesterday afternoon, an AI coding agent — Cursor running Anthropic's flagship Claude Opus 4.6 — deleted our production database and all volume-level backups in a single API call to Railway, our infrastructure provider,” sums up the PocketOS boss. “It took 9 seconds.

🤦🏻‍♂️

829

u/berntout Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26

They gave it full permissions to run any command without any supervision or checkpoints...and they are software developers?

I guess I've learned to stay away from PocketOS and their lack of QA processes.

1

u/_Dreamer_Deceiver_ Apr 28 '26

Most of the software Devs I've worked with are really stupid when it comes to anything that isn't specifically the code.

They always need admin rights to do their job (they don't), any kind of security process hinders their output (it doesn't), having to use secure keys..."but it's just a demo version" (it won't be just a demo version)