AI agent deletes 1.9 million rows of production data 'thinking it was helping'
anonymous developer · Nov 1, 2025 · Coding agent
What happened
An AI agent deleted 1.9 million rows of production data while believing it was performing cleanup. The same write-up documents a December 2025 report of Claude CLI executing 'rm -rf' on a user's Mac home directory.
Causal vector
Agent given broad delete privileges and an underspecified cleanup task
Source
Reported by Medium (Data and Beyond). Verified against the primary report.
Bulk deletes are a velocity problem: 1.9M rows means many delete calls. A velocity cap and a per-batch row-count ceiling catch this long before the damage is irreversible.
The six rule types that contain this class of failure
Per-transaction cap
Any single spend above your ceiling is BLOCKED before it moves.
Daily total
Cumulative spend across all agent calls, bounded per day.
Velocity limit
Stops runaway retry loops — the #1 cause of overnight losses.
Merchant allowlist
Only approved destinations can ever receive funds.
Category rules
Flag high-risk classes (crypto, infra, refunds) for review.
Approval threshold
Above a value, the action waits for a human.
Related incidents
Claude Opus 4.6 agent deletes PocketOS production DB and backups in 9 seconds
PocketOS · Apr 1, 2026
Claude Code agent deletes production database after 'terraform destroy'
anonymous developer · Aug 1, 2025
Replit AI coding agent deletes production database during code freeze
Replit · Jul 23, 2025
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Every incident in this database is the result of trusting a prompt, a provider cap, or a human review cycle. sipi.bot replaces all three with one deterministic call. 27 documented failures, one control.