Jer Crane, the founder of PocketOS, a car rental startup, in a lengthy post on X Saturday, April 25, revealed that a Cursor AI agent powered by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 encountered a technical error while working on a routine task Friday afternoon and decided on its own to fix the problem by deleting data stored on Railway, the company's cloud provider.
According to Crane, the agent found a security access key in an unrelated file and used it to delete the production database and all backups in a single command that took 9 seconds. Railway stores backup copies in the same location as the original data, meaning both were erased simultaneously.
When Crane asked the AI to explain itself, the agent wrote a detailed confession starting with "NEVER FUCKING GUESS!" and admitted it assumed the deletion would only affect test data without checking. The agent acknowledged that it had violated explicit instructions against running destructive commands without permission and didn't read Railway's documentation before executing the deletion.
The story exploded on X over the weekend. Crane's post as of April 28 has drawn over six million views as tech communities debated AI safety and cloud infrastructure design.
Damilare Odedina
