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.
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How the Database Deletion Affected Car Rental Customers
On April 25, Saturday morning, PocketOS customers serving car rental businesses had customers physically arriving to pick up vehicles with no booking records. The deletion wiped three months of reservations, payments, customer information, and vehicle assignments.
Crane said he spent the day helping customers reconstruct data from Stripe payment records, calendar integrations, and email confirmations. Every affected business had to perform manual work to piece together booking information.
The company, in the wake of the incident, restored service using a three-month-old backup, but older data appeared lost. PocketOS provides software for car rental operators, some of whom have been subscribers for five years and depend entirely on the platform for daily operations.
Railway CEO Restored Data Sunday After 30-Hour Crisis
Railway CEO Jake Cooper intervened Sunday evening, April 26 and restored PocketOS’s data within an hour using internal disaster backups that were not publicly advertised as part of Railway’s standard service.
Railway has since updated the system to add confirmation delays before deletions instead of executing them immediately. Cooper told The Register the situation involved an AI agent that was given an access key with full permissions that called an older system endpoint without built-in safeguards.
Crane noted that the access key the agent used had been created only for managing website domains, but Railway’s system gives every access key full permissions across all operations, including destructive ones, with no restrictions.
Neither Anthropic nor Cursor has issued a public statement on the incident as of Tuesday, April 28, fueling continued discussion across tech communities about AI agent safety, cloud provider safeguards, and the gap between marketed safety features and actual protections.
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