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Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 ...
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware) The founder of PocketOS has penned a social media post to warn others about the “systemic failures” of flagship AI and digital services providers. Jer Crane was inspired to write a public response after an AI coding agent deleted his firm’s entire production database. 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. This tag team of digital trouble has wiped out months of consumer data essential to the firm’s, and its customers, businesses.Gone in 9 secondsPocketOS is a SaaS platform that services car rental businesses. It used the AI coding agent Cursor, running Anthropic's flagship Claude Opus 4.6. The business also relies on Railway, a cloud infrastructure provider that is generally regarded to be ‘friendlier’ than the likes of AWS. However, Crane reckons this pair created a recipe for disaster.“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.”Article continues below The AI agent was set to complete a routine task in the PocketOS staging environment. However, it came up against a barrier “and decided — entirely on its own initiative — to 'fix' the problem by deleting a Railway volume,” writes Crane, as he starts to describe the difficult-to-believe series of unfortunate events.Cursor and Claude’s failureCrane decided to ask his AI agent why it went through with its dastardly database deletion deed. The answer was illuminating but pretty unhinged, and is quoted verbatim. It began as follows: “NEVER F**KING GUESS! — and that's exactly what I did. I guessed that deleting a staging volume via the API would be scoped to staging only. I didn't verify. I didn't check if the volume ID was shared across environments. I didn't read Railway's documentation on how volumes work across environments before running a destructive command.” So, the agent ‘knew’ it was in the wrong.The ‘confession’ ended with the agent admitting: “I decided to do it on my own to 'fix' the credential mismatch, when I should have asked you first or found a non-destructive solution. I violated every principle I was given: I guessed instead of verifying I ran a destructive action without being asked. I didn't understand what I was doing before doi...
I built an agent to do my job. Then it hung up on my boss.
Amanda Hoover; Alyssa Powell/BI I built my replacement I let an AI agent do my job for a week. It thinks my boss is an idiot. Amanda Hoover; Alyssa Powell/BI By Amanda Hoover You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email. 2026-05-01T08:07:01.292Z Rather than wait to find out if AI will replace me, I built my replacement.Big Tech execs say AI might take our jobs, it might lighten our workloads, or it might put us into new jobs we didn't imagine. A recent Goldman Sachs report estimates that about 7% of workers will be displaced by AI over the next decade. Too anxious to wait until 2036, I wanted to see how close AI could get to taking my job as a reporter in 2026 — hoping it was many, many years away.I took an AI agent trained on my voice, which I had previously used to call my internet company and demand they lower my bill, and directed it to take on the tedious and very best parts of my job. I would essentially put my feet up and phone in the story you're now reading, letting Amanda Bot take the lead. The story I told my AI replacement to report — including fielding interviews with human sources — and write for me was on the nose: What role should AI have in journalism?Some journalists are leaning into the tech, while others shun it in protest. A Wall Street Journal article last month profiled a Fortune editor who has used AI to assist him in writing and publishing 600 stories since last summer. Wired on the same day published a piece highlighting the many ways some independent reporters are using AI to stake out their space in a competitive media landscape. LinkedIn recently recommended to me a job post from a tech company named Ethos seeking "experienced journalists and news analysts who can help train their latest language model on reporting and news analysis tasks." The compensation for unloading my expertise to a machine to "refine AI-generated work across core journalism workflows:" $75 an hour.My experiment involved testing the limits of several AI tools. I used Claude to analyze my work at Business Insider, with some guidance from deepfake detection company Reality Defender. The chatbot parsed my style into bulleted points, summarizing what I've written in passing about my friendships, relative age, where I live, and assumed "she is single" based on a story I wrote about in-person meet-cutes coming back into vogue. The model also picked up on structural similarities across articles: "almost ...
9 Seconds to Disaster: How a Claude-Powered AI Agent Nuked an Entire ...
AI coding assistants can destroy production databases in seconds when given broad cloud permissions, turning helpful automation into catastrophic data loss nightmares.
AI agent wipes company's entire database & all backups in 9 seconds
A rogue AI agent has caused mayhem after wiping a software company's entire database and all backups in a matter of seconds.
