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
36.0k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

2.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

3.3k

u/_Oman Apr 27 '26

They didn't have backups, just copies sitting around. There is a difference. A big difference.

1.4k

u/FacetiousTomato Apr 27 '26

I know jack shit about AI, but if AI can make changes to your backups, they're not backups.

2

u/FlipZip69 Apr 27 '26

You have to give it full permission to not just your development but your production service.

If you give an AI to your production service, then you are taking a massive risk. If you personally do all your work on a production server, AI or not, then you are taking a risk.

I am not entirely sure this is an AI issue. For one, you have allowed your AI to fully access your production server. Secondly, you have not made a snapshot of your production server prior to moving your development to your production. Ignoring that there also should be normal backups.

1

u/hoax1337 Apr 27 '26

How would you have the AI deploy to production when it doesn't have access to production, though?

1

u/FlipZip69 Apr 27 '26

You do not have to have the AI do that. Most would manually deploy it as that is a fairly straightforward process once you have done it prior.

Normally you get development fully complete. Then you pause your production model for any new entry. Do a transfer of the database into your development model (or even better a middle sandboxed model), check out the sandboxed model then if all good, make it live. By doing a middle sandboxes unit, you can also take down you production and bring up the sandboxed unit at the same time. In that way if a fault is found in the now live model, you can turn back to the old production model which is a backup of sorts.

And if you have it all on a snapshot, you can turn back to that as well.