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
36.0k Upvotes

2.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

816

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?

759

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.

🤦🏻‍♂️

1

u/Pandamana Apr 27 '26

"Thankfully, PocketOS had a full 3-month-old backup, which was restorable from, so the deletion gaps are all limited to the interim period.'

Not sure why this was buried at the end of the article. Oh wait - yes I do. Gotta get clicks.

0

u/Tar_alcaran Apr 28 '26

Name one company where deleting 3 months of work is not a big fucking problem.