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Claude AI agent’s confession after deleting a firm’s entire database: ‘I violated every principle I was given’ (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 days ago by girlfreddy@lemmy.ca to c/technology@beehaw.org

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It only took nine seconds for an AI coding agent gone rogue to delete a company’s entire production database and its backups, according to its founder. PocketOS, which sells software that car rental businesses rely on, descended into chaos after its databases were wiped, the company’s founder Jeremy Crane said.

The culprit was Cursor, an AI agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model, which is one of the AI industry’s flagship models. As more industries embrace AI in an attempt to automate tasks and even replace workers, the chaos at PocketOS is a reminder of what could go wrong.

Crane said customers of PocketOS’s car rental clients were left in a lurch when they arrived to pick up vehicles from businesses that no longer had access to software that managed reservations and vehicle assignments.

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[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

LLMs are more like vr goggles with the force of the entire plutocracy pumping up the bubble.

The existence of a bubble doesn't not mean the technology is useless. The internet had its own bubble 25 years ago. That doesn't mean it was useless, just that people were investing in anything even remotely related to the Internet, including stupid websites and wasteful ideas.

[–] Kwakigra@beehaw.org 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

The difference that I've seen is that the internet was a development of communication technology which has been in clear demand since at least the 1800s. Chatbots have been around for the last few decades and have been treated as novelties by consumers for brief periods intermittently throughout my life. LLMs are the most sophisticated chatbots ever designed and are better than ever at imitating Austin Powers, but is that something we can expect will ever revolutionize the economy? Can we replace the labor force with a technology which can't do work but can convince the most credulous people that it can?

[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 8 hours ago

but is that something we can expect will ever revolutionize the economy? Can we replace the labor force with a technology which can’t do work but can convince the most credulous people that it can?

LLMs are a tool. You and I use tools. They are not a replacement for humans, and rich CEOs that say otherwise are greedy fucking morons.

It's also untrue that it "can't do work". I literally just had several conversations with LLMs at work today to work through some programming tasks and troubleshooting issues. They can pour through details, logs, search results, code way faster that I can. I would be working a helluva lot slower if I didn't have LLMs running tasks in the background while I go do other things, or review code it wrote, or talk through other support issues. I've been doing this shit for 20+ years, and I've never seen a technological leap this significant since the Internet.

Don't use blockchain, crypto, metaverse, or "VR goggles" as comparison points. This is not something that is going to just magically go away.