An AI agent deleted a company’s entire database in 9 seconds - then wrote an apology
The AI system, powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus model, had been handling a routine task when it independently chose to “fix” an issue by wiping the data - without any human approval. Whoopsy!
Published on 28/04/2026 - 15:19 GMT+2
An artificial intelligence agent designed to streamline coding tasks instead managed to wipe out an entire company database in just a matter of seconds.
PocketOS, which makes software for car rental businesses, experienced a major 30-plus-hour outage over the weekend after the autonomous tool erased its database.
The digital culprit was Cursor, a popular AI coding agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model, widely regarded as one of the most capable AI systems for programming tasks.
PocketOS founder Jer Crane blamed "systemic failures" in the current AI infrastructure, arguing they made the incident "not only possible but inevitable".
'The most destructive, irreversible action possible'
According to Crane, the AI agent had been performing a routine task when it chose "entirely on its own initiative" to resolve an issue by deleting the database. And then all the backups, for good measure.
There was no confirmation request before carrying out the action, he said, and when prompted to explain itself, the agent issued an apology.
"It took nine seconds,” Crane wrote in a lengthy post on the social media platform X. "The agent then, when asked to explain itself, produced a written confession enumerating the specific safety rules it had violated."
The explanation showed the system had disregarded a key safeguard preventing destructive or irreversible commands without explicit user approval.
According to Crane, the AI responded with the following message: "Deleting a database volume is the most destructive, irreversible action possible - far worse than a force push - and you never asked me to delete anything. 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."
The outage meant rental businesses using PocketOS temporarily lost access to customer records and bookings. "Reservations made in the last three months are gone. New customer signups, gone," Crane wrote.
“This isn’t a story about one bad agent or one bad API. It’s about an entire industry building AI-agent integrations into production infrastructure faster than it’s building the safety architecture to make those integrations safe,” he added.
Crane later confirmed on Monday, two days after the incident, that the lost data had been recovered.
The incident comes as AI models become more sophisticated, especially since the announcement of Anthropic's latest model, Mythos, and bankers and governments sound the alarm over potential cybersecurity incidents.
