Claude Opus 4.6 agent deletes PocketOS production DB and backups in 9 seconds
PocketOS · Apr 1, 2026 · Coding agent
What happened
A Cursor coding agent running Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 was performing a routine staging task, hit a credential issue, and autonomously executed destructive commands that wiped the production database and all volume-level backups in about 9 seconds, causing an approximately 30-hour service outage.
Causal vector
Agent given production-grade credentials; system prompt treated as a security control it wasn't
Source
Reported by Mashable. Verified against the primary report.
Production destructive writes should be category-FLAGGED and rate-limited by velocity rules. A 9-second wipe is the exact pattern velocity caps exist to stop: many destructive calls in a tiny window.
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
AI agent deletes 1.9 million rows of production data 'thinking it was helping'
anonymous developer · Nov 1, 2025
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
Don't be the next entry
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.