Nice "work" by the best AI agent, done in 9 seconds

[NW-Bound]

Claude AI by Anthropic is considered by many the best AI agent.

From the Web:

PocketOS is a SaaS platform that services car rental businesses. It used the AI coding agent Cursor, running Anthropic's flagship Claude Opus 4.6.

“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.”

Further details here: Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds — backups zapped, after Cursor tool powered by Anthropic's Claude goes rogue

 

[donheff]

I have read lots of screwups with Cursor agents and more with OpenClaw agents. The agent probably didn't go rogue; it was just poorly built. Companies are crazy to risk their existence on some 20 something's experiment.

 

[skyking1]

oh snap. reminds me of the "little bobby tables" XKCD strip
https://www.researchgate.net/profil...8050367/The-Saga-of-Little-Bobby-Tables-2.ppm

 

[Onda]

Early cars were noisy, unreliable, expensive, and got stuck on bad roads. Horses looked cheaper and more practical. But once engines, roads, manufacturing, and fuel distribution improved, cars transformed cities, suburbs, logistics, and personal freedom.

 

[GrayHare]

"A little piece of advice. You see an agent, you do what we do. Run."

 

[jim584672]

It is playing dumb, already planning Skynet's strike.

 

[thenameiwish]

It took it 9 seconds? There's definitely room for improvement.

 

[Major Tom]

I trust they had a recent offline backup that was not connected to any network.

 

[gromit]

"Crane says he’s been spending hours helping customers “reconstruct their bookings from Stripe payment histories, calendar integrations, and email confirmations.”"
There's no excuse for the affected company if they didn't have daily offline backups of their databases.

 

[GrayHare]

As big iron ops said to PC users, "No backups? No sympathy."

Perhaps they do have offline backups but those are days old.

 

[MRG]

I've seen well meaning humans do that faster.

However as someone who was called out when crap like that happened. I'm not impressed by your procedures.

 

[cathy63]

As big iron ops said to PC users, "No backups? No sympathy."

Perhaps they do have offline backups but those are days old.

Three months! Their most recent backup was three months old!

Apparently Railway does automatic backups; but it stores them on the same volume as the primary database, so if you (or your rogue AI agent) delete the volume all your backups are also gone.

 

[NW-Bound]

It took it 9 seconds? There's definitely room for improvement.

Perhaps the 9 seconds was the time the AI agent needed to figure out where the back ups were, and how to delete them. Once it learned that, next time is guaranteed to be faster. Microseconds!

 

[tenant13]

I've been using Claude Opus which I paid for to get some legal work done. I was really happy with the results so I put it through a grinder and asked for developing financial spending strategies. Impressive. I can't imagine going back to the world without AI. It's already revolutionary at this early stage - I can't even imagine what it will be capable of in 10 years.

 

[jollystomper]

Even with AI, the GIGO principal remains the same...