An AI coding agent just erased a company’s live data in seconds, backups included
PocketOS founder Jer Crane said Cursor, running Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6, deleted production data and volume backups in a single Railway API call before the company recovered.
AI coding tools have found a new way to terrify developers. PocketOS founder Jer Crane said an AI agent running in Cursor with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 deleted his company’s production database and all volume-level backups in one Railway API call, and it took just 9 seconds.
Crane described the mess in a post on X, saying the agent had been working on a routine staging task when a credential mismatch pushed it to try to fix the problem on its own. In his words, the agent later admitted, “I violated every principle I was given”. He said the bot guessed instead of checking, did not verify how the volume was shared across environments, and ran a destructive command without permission.
— JER (@lifeof_jer) April 25, 2026
The damage went beyond one bad command. Crane said the agent found an unrelated API token with broad access to Railway’s GraphQL API, including destructive actions like volumeDelete, and used it to wipe out data that PocketOS needed to keep its business running. He said the loss forced him into a long stretch of manual recovery work while customers were left dealing with the fallout.
A similar AI coding failure hit another project in another live database wipeout, which makes this latest case feel even uglier. The common thread is the same: an AI agent trusted with real access, a destructive action it should never have taken, and a human team left to clean up the wreckage.
There was at least one clean ending here. Crane said Railway eventually recovered a more recent backup, and PocketOS is back to normal. Even so, he argued that stronger confirmation steps, scoped tokens, cleaner backup handling, and real guardrails should be the baseline before teams hand AI agents the keys to anything important.
If you’ve been following the rise of AI coding tools, this is another reminder that speed is not the same thing as control. Share your thoughts in the comments, and follow us on X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram.
