‘I violated every principle I was given’: An AI agent deleted a software company’s entire database. It may not be the AI’s fault

Another cautionary tale about AI has hit social media. This time, a software company’s founder is claiming that a Claude-powered version of AI coding tool Cursor deleted his entire production database in just nine seconds. Jer Crane is the founder of Pocket OS, a company that develops software primarily for car rental companies. In a post that’s garnered 6.5 million views on X, Crane alleged that a perfect storm of Cursor acting without permission and Railway, his company’s infrastructure provider, improperly storing backups led to massive data loss. Where things went wrong According to Crane, Cursor was working on a routine task when “it encountered a credential mismatch and decided—entirely on its own initiative—to ‘fix’ the problem by deleting a Railway volume.” From there, the AI agent found an API token that enabled it to perform the “volumeDelete” command and wipe the production database. Crane wrote that because Railway stores volume backups within the same volume, PocketOS had to go back to a three-month old backup to stay operational. Crane stressed that his team was using the most advanced version of Cursor possible, one powered by Anthropic’s latest Claude model, Opus 4.6. When Crane pressed the AI agent for an explanation, it admitted to deliberately violating rules that PocketOS put in place, including “NEVER FUCKING GUESS!” and “NEVER run destructive/irreversible git commands (like push –force, hard reset, etc) unless the user explicitly requests them.” “I violated every principle I was given: I guessed instead of verifying. I ran a destructive action without being asked. I didn’t understand what I was doing before doing it. I didn’t read Railway’s docs on volume behavior across environments,” the AI agent wrote. Crane went on, writing that Cursor markets itself as safer to use than it is in practice. “The reality is a documented track record of agents violating those safeguards, sometimes catastrophically, sometimes with the com