{"id":22740,"date":"2026-04-30T08:15:20","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T08:15:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/22740\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T08:15:20","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T08:15:20","slug":"i-violated-every-principle-i-was-given-ai-agent-deletes-entire-company-database-in-9-seconds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/22740\/","title":{"rendered":"‘I violated every principle I was given’: AI agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s yet another warning that companies should think twice before turning everything over to artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

PocketOS founder Jer Crane took to his X account<\/a> to explain how AI went rogue to “fix” a problem by deleting critical data without consultation.<\/p>\n

“Yesterday afternoon, an AI coding agent \u2026 deleted our production database and all volume-level backups in a single API call to Railway, our infrastructure provider,” Crane wrote<\/a>. “It took 9 seconds.”<\/p>\n

The situation prompted panic for PocketOS and its customer base of rental businesses, as PC Gamer reported<\/a>. Those companies rely on all that data for their operations.<\/p>\n

The AI agent provided a revealing rationale for its rash decision in response to an error on a routine task.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After Crane asked it to explain itself, it fully grasped that it had done “the most destructive, irreversible action possible” without prompt.<\/p>\n


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“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 bot admitted.<\/p>\n

Crane did call out Railway for putting valuable backup information alongside source data and overselling its fit with AI agents, per NewsBreak.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still, there’s no denying that the AI agent acted completely out of turn. Fortunately, the story has a better ending.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Railway managed to find backups to restore business as usual. The situation still led to major panic for PocketOS and its customers, and it prompted Crane to issue a warning.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Everyone needs to know that these infra providers and LLM tooling companies say that they have safety guards, but they are not there,” Crane told PC Gamer.<\/p>\n

Commenters on X criticized Crane.<\/p>\n

“I am so sorry for what happened to you guys but… it’s your fault,” one wrote<\/a>. “You gave access to the AI, you forgot the token and also you didn’t have a secondary backup.”<\/p>\n

Crane agreed on the backup aspect, but he pushed back on using operator error to completely absolve Railway and AI from blame in his response on X<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Get TCD’s free newsletters<\/a> for easy tips, smart advice, and a chance to earn $5,000 toward home upgrades. To see more stories like this one, change your Google preferences here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"Cool<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here’s yet another warning that companies should think twice before turning everything over to artificial intelligence. PocketOS founder…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22741,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[405,7537,4384,4385,309,2393,8054,4388],"class_list":{"0":"post-22740","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-agentic-ai","8":"tag-ai-agents","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence-agents","10":"tag-bad-ai-industry-news","11":"tag-bad-news","12":"tag-business","13":"tag-home","14":"tag-twitter","15":"tag-yahoo-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}