It only took nine seconds for an AI coding agent gone rogue to delete a company’s entire production database and its backups, according to its founder. PocketOS, which sells software that car rental businesses rely on, descended into chaos after its databases were wiped, the company’s founder Jeremy Crane said.
The culprit was Cursor, an AI agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model, which is one of the AI industry’s flagship models. As more industries embrace AI in an attempt to automate tasks and even replace workers, the chaos at PocketOS is a reminder of what could go wrong.
Crane said customers of PocketOS’s car rental clients were left in a lurch when they arrived to pick up vehicles from businesses that no longer had access to software that managed reservations and vehicle assignments.
It’s not a “confession”. Don’t abuse the English language. The AI system doesn’t have a conscience, so it can’t feel guilty or feel bad or apologetic. It is incapable of confessing to things. All it can do is “say” or “write”.
Similarly, AI agents don’t “hallucinate”. They can’t have “hallucinations” because they don’t have a conception of reality to begin with. Rather, they have “errors” and “error rates”.
Also wrong. An error for an llm is if it fails to return random text based on the supplied context. You have an error rate as a user applying that random text to your systems.
A backup 3 months old off-site. That doesn’t sound like a very recent backup 🌝
Good. Zero sympathy for these people.
Giving free access to a tool you can’t rely on, over a system you must rely on. What could go wrong? /s
Plus come on, even my personal files get a monthly backup, and I’m damn sloppy*.
Ah, and like others said: Claude didn’t “confess” anything. A confession is an acknowledgement of something you’ve done but you’d rather avoid others knowing, good luck claiming a bot has a mental model of people like we do.
*currently using a single off-site backup, a USB stick. This will change in a few days, as my new hard disk pops up; the old one will be used for, among other things, backup of important files. Then I’ll get a bona fide 3-2-1.
‘I violated every principle I was given
And…
spoiler
Got it, claude is a brat
No the culprit was not the AI. It was the lack of understanding what it can and what it can not do. And blaming something like this on a large language model is plain incompetence
Same, girl.
