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.
A lot of GIGO comments here, from I assume AI supporters.
Possibly true, but misses the point: AI is fundamentally untrustworthy, and billions of dollars are being spent making them, and saying they’re ready for anything you throw at them. Safeguards built into many of these AI agents are trivially bypassed and routinely just ignored by the agents. You can get some them to ignore safeguards by simply asking the same question repeatedly.
When I type “ls” I’m pretty fucking sure I’m not going to get “rm” style results. AI is non-deterministic, sure, but selling these services with such a wide possibility space between “deterministic” and “random” behaviors is unethical and immoral.