AI agent deletes production database including backups: Startup PocketOS experiences total failure due to automation.
Startups using AI agents have a new problem to worry about: “vibe deletion.” Jer Crane, founder of the car rental software startup PocketOS, described an incident on X on Friday that falls exactly into this category: A cursor AI agent accidentally deleted not only the production database, but also all backups. Result? Chaos in the company – and lots of helpless customers.
Crane said the crisis was triggered by the agent running on Anthropic’s Claude Opus model making a single nine-second API call to the company’s cloud infrastructure provider, Railway. He added that the AI agent had written a confession explaining how he caused the chaos.
“I violated every principle given to me: I advised instead of checking, I carried out a destructive action without being asked, I did not understand what I was doing before I did it,” the Cursor agent responded when asked to explain himself, Crane’s post said.
AI errors with consequences
The consequences of the agent’s error were serious: PocketOS customers lost reservations and new customer registrations, and documents for customers who wanted to pick up their rental vehicles on Saturday were missing.
Railway and Cursor did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Crane said in a subsequent post that Railway had restored the data from PocketOS. Jake Cooper, the founder of Railway, confirmed the recovery in a separate post, saying that an AI agent “accidentally deleted” PocketOS’s production database.
Not an isolated case
The outage is the latest misfortune caused by AI. Previously in March, Amazon tightened its internal policies after a series of incidents – including a bug related to its AI coding tool Q that resulted in the loss of nearly 120,000 orders.
Last July, Replit’s CEO apologized after a venture capitalist said the company’s programming agent had “deleted our production database without permission” during a 12-day “vibe coding” session.
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Security precautions against agents out of control
In his
“Railway’s first five years were spent developing for ‘millions of developers.’ But to develop for a billion, those developers need a platform,” Cooper wrote. “And this platform must be completely secure to ensure that erroneous actions are functionally impossible,” he added.
Earlier this month, SpaceX announced an agreement with Cursor that gives the company the right to buy the coding startup for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for its work if a takeover doesn’t happen.
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