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 junior developer is fundamentally untrustworthy. That’s why you don’t give them access to the fucking prod database and backups.
We don’t know what the prompt and past input was. Maybe it wasn’t as “random” as you make it out to be. A company stupid enough to let LLMs touch their prod database is going to include a bunch of other stupid inputs.
You’re approaching this from the perspective of “all LLMs are bad so don’t use them”, which is its own version of unethical and immoral. A company that isn’t using LLMs is like a company not using the Internet.
LLMs are useful, everybody should use them to some capacity, and understanding a technology is far far better than spouting off ignorant bullshit like this.
Do yourself a favor: download a free model on HuggingFace, learn how they work, experiment with the technology on your own video card. It doesn’t have to be some super-powered video card. You can get models that fit in a 8GB card just fine.
LLMs are more like vr goggles with the force of the entire plutocracy pumping up the bubble. What is the value proposition for “intelligence” which can’t reason nor possibly determine fact from falsehood? When consumers start to pay what it actually costs to run these things, is it possible to profit? What are they good at other than confidence schemes?