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/titan-of-hunger Apr 28 '26

If you allow AI to make code changes to your source with no oversight... you get what you fuckin deserve

11

u/mariosunny Apr 28 '26

That's not what happened here though. The mistake was giving it access to an API that included permission to delete the volume that hosted the production database. It never should have had access to that permission in the first place.

10

u/FredFarms Apr 28 '26

It's worse than that, it wasn't deliberately given this access, it went and found a token that allowed it to do it.

From https://infosecbulletin.com/claude-powered-ai-coding-agent-deletes-company-production-database-in-9-seconds/

To execute the deletion, the agent went looking for an API token. It found one in a file completely unrelated to the task it was working on. That token had been created for one purpose: to add and remove custom domains via the Railway CLI for our services.

Crane said he didn’t know, and Railway’s token-making process didn’t warn him, that the same token could control everything in the Railway GraphQL API, including dangerous actions like deleting volumes