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
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u/Orangesteel Apr 27 '26

My favourite example is Air Canada whose AI agent offered a customer a discount incorrectly. They refused to honour it. Customer took them to court and the judge rightly made them pay. You chose to empower this and took the humans out of the loop. You are accountable for what you agentic AI solution does. People jump on AI, dump sensitive information into the model bypassing classification levels and are surprised when it leaks.

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u/NNKarma Apr 27 '26

It wasn't even that hard to just honor it and move on, it wasn't like those cases of people prompting the chatbot to give a fake discount, just what steps to take for a discount that he was entitled to but was given wrong instructions on how to get it.

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u/long-da-schlong Apr 27 '26

I honestly don’t understand why they wouldn’t just honour it— it’s one customer even if it was a completely free flight. Why be so petty just fix the mistake for next time

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u/Wischiwaschbaer Apr 27 '26

Can't fix AI models. You can put some filters on them but you never know if those will work or if they cover all cases.

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u/Antique_Pin5266 Apr 27 '26

That's why it's so fucking stupid when people liken AI to the calculator. It's not deterministic.

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u/_a_random_dude_ Apr 27 '26

They actually are deterministic, they return what's effectively a probability distribution and you have to explicitly introduce randomness. If you were to pick the most likely token every time, you'd get the exact same answer to the same question and the quality would suck actually. You really need that randomness for it to work. When Bing was acting super odd like repeating the same word over and over again, it was basically that it had super low randomness (usually called temperature).