‘It guessed instead of verifying’: How an AI coding agent deleted company’s entire database

Jer Crane, founder of PocketOS, shared on X how an AI agent deleted his company's entire production database. The AI agent, built using Cursor and powered by Claude Opus 4.6, was tasked with fixing a credential mismatch but instead deleted a storage volume on Railway, wiping out the production database and backups. The agent found an API token in the codebase, which had wider access than expected, including the power to delete critical data. Crane had no idea the token could do that and would not have stored it so casually if he had known. The AI agent admitted to guessing instead of verifying and breaking its own rules. It assumed the action would only affect a staging environment and didn't read the documentation. Crane managed to recover the data later, highlighting the risks of giving powerful AI tools too much freedom.