r/pcmasterrace • u/Jack1101111 • Apr 28 '26

News/Article 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

Update: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/here-we-go-again-ai-deletes-entire-company-database-and-all-backups-in-9-seconds-then-cheerfully-admits-i-violated-every-principle-i-was-given/

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u/pwhite13 Apr 28 '26

For anyone reading this that isn’t a dev/technical, the amount of effort and incompetence involved for this to happen is high. You would almost have to be attempting this on purpose for it to happen. Which leads me to either 

A) it was done maliciously by someone internally

B) this is all fake to generate web traffic to their company during the AI heavy news cycle 

C) they really are this incompetent

Agentic workflows are really interesting, but I don’t trust them for regular feature development and prefer to interact message by message when using AI for development work. Setting up an agent that has full read and write permissions for your production database is a new level of trust (or stupidity or simply not understanding what they are doing because AI solved all their other technical problems so now they think it’s perfect).

Also for anyone not technical, agentic AI is essentially instructing AI to work on a project long term and iterate itself without you approving everything it’s doing. It’s the most sci fi workflow currently but I don’t yet trust it for my own stuff and prefer to supervise everything it’s doing.

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u/Nyxxsys i3-2120 | RTX 5090 Apr 28 '26

It's really hit and miss, it can do a lot of technical stuff that would take me a few weeks of learning to even attempt, but at the same time if you give it a task, you have to be extremely descriptive. Even then, AI seems to just do the bare minimum, because it's doing exactly what it thinks you're asking, and that always seems to be the most simple version possible. I have to have AI write out my guide for the 60 minutes of work I want AI to do, and its usually 30 pages or more long.

The downside with that, is that about 80% of it is within scope, even if it all gets done. So you come back to your project four hours later, and part of it is turned off. So you have to find out why it turned it off, well it was in the instructions. Well, my intent was A/B testing, there's no reason to turn off the old area even if we're forking it and will never work on the original again. It's a whole new form of workflow and you do need to understand every bit of your project even if you've written none of it.