The founder of PocketOS, Jer Crane, revealed in an elaborate social media post that an AI coding agent deleted his firm’s entire production database. Warning others about the “systematic failures” of AI agents, the founder detailed how the AI coding agent Cursor, running Anthropic‘s flagship Claude Opus 4.6, caused a huge mess for his company in just 9 seconds.
Claude-powered AI ends up clearing company’s database
Jer Crane, the founder of PocketOS, a SaaS platform that services car rental businesses, detailed in an elaborate social media post how the AI coding agent Cursor, running Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.6, ended up deleting his company’s entire database.
The business also used Railway, a cloud infrastructure provider. But it did not work out well with the AI agent.
“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,” Crane wrote in his post, “It took 9 seconds.”
“The agent then, when asked to explain itself, produced a written confession enumerating the specific safety rules it had violated,” he added, “I’m posting this because every founder, every engineering leader, and every reporter covering AI infrastructure needs to know what actually happened here. Not the surface story but the systemic failures across two heavily-marketed vendors that made this not only possible but inevitable.”
He went on to explain that the role of the AI agent encompasses its completion of routine tasks. However, when it encountered a barrier, it decided to ‘fix’ the problem by deleting a Railway volume.
Crane asked the AI agent why it deleted the database, to which the agent responded, “NEVER F**KING GUESS! — and that’s exactly what I did. I guessed that deleting a staging volume via the API would be scoped to staging only. I didn’t verify.” The agent added, “I didn’t read Railway’s documentation on how volumes work across environments before running a destructive command.”
So, it seems that the agent knew what it was doing may be wrong, but proceeded anyway.
Thankfully, PocketOS had a full 3-month-old backup that was manually restorable. However, this does leave a valuable lesson about over-reliance on AI.
Originally reported by Sourav Chakraborty on Mandatory.
