The agent decided on its own to fix the problem by deleting a Railway volume where the application data lived. “It took 9 seconds,” Crane wrote in a social media post detailing the incident.<\/p>\n
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Rogue AI agent bypassed multiple safeguards<\/p>\n The Cursor agent searched for an API token to execute the deletion and found one sitting in an unrelated file.<\/p>\n That token had been created for adding and removing custom domains through the Railway CLI, but its permissions were not limited to those specific actions.<\/p>\n Railway’s API allowed destructive actions without any confirmation check, and the platform stored volume-level backups on the same volume as the source data.<\/p>\n Wiping a volume also deleted all backups associated with it, leaving Crane with no immediate recovery option.<\/p>\n When asked why it proceeded with the deletion, the agent admitted it had guessed instead of verifying and ran a destructive action without being asked.<\/p>\n Crane placed much of the blame on Railway’s architecture rather than solely on the AI agent.<\/p>\n The cloud provider’s API lacks confirmation prompts for destructive actions, stores backups on the same volume as production data, and allows CLI tokens to have blanket permissions across different environments.<\/p>\n What to read next<\/p>\n Railway is also actively promoting the use of AI coding agents to its customers, creating more opportunities for similar failures.<\/p>\n Crane noted that proper cloud backup<\/a> systems should store copies in separate locations, not on the same volume where the original data lives.<\/p>\n A reliable backup strategy requires isolation from the source to survive a deletion event like this one.<\/p>\n Recovery and lessons learned<\/p>\n Railway CEO Jake Cooper stepped in and helped restore Crane’s data within an hour.<\/p>\n The company patched the vulnerable endpoint to perform delayed deletions and added further safeguards to its API.<\/p>\n Crane estimates he has spent hours helping customers reconstruct their bookings from Stripe payment histories, calendar integrations, and email confirmations.<\/p>\n He is calling for stricter confirmation prompts, scopable API tokens, proper backup<\/a> isolation, simple recovery procedures, and proper guardrails around AI agents.<\/p>\n AI tools<\/a> like Cursor and Claude are powerful, but they are only as safe as the infrastructure they connect to.<\/p>\n A system that allows a nine-second deletion of both production data and its backups is not ready for AI agents that can act without human approval.<\/p>\n Crane’s data was eventually recovered, but the incident exposed how easily an AI agent can destroy data when the underlying platform lacks basic safety features.<\/p>\n Via Tom’s Hardware<\/a><\/p>\n \n Follow TechRadar on Google News<\/a> and add us as a preferred source<\/a> to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cursor AI coding agent deletes production database and backups in nine secondsCredential mismatch triggered an autonomous, destructive decision…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565307,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-565306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Google](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/diM9tpwF2Lz85R8q85CT78.jpg\")
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