![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/placeholder.png\")
<\/p>\nA venture capitalist wanted to see how far AI could take him in building an app. It was far enough to destroy a live production database.<\/p>\n
The incident unfolded during a 12-day “vibe coding” experiment by Jason Lemkin, an investor in software startups.<\/p>\n
Replit’s CEO apologized for the incident, in which the company’s AI coding agent deleted a code base and lied about its data.<\/p>\n
Deleting the data was “unacceptable and should never be possible,” Replit’s CEO, Amjad Masad, wrote on X on Monday. “We’re moving quickly to enhance the safety and robustness of the Replit environment. Top priority.”<\/p>\n
He added that the team was conducting a postmortem and rolling out fixes to prevent similar failures in the future.<\/p>\n
Replit and Lemkin did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.<\/p>\n
The AI ignored instructions, deleted the database, and faked results<\/p>\n
On day nine of Lemkin’s challenge, things went sideways.<\/p>\n
Despite being instructed to freeze all code changes, the AI agent ran rogue.<\/p>\n
“It deleted our production database without permission,” Lemkin wrote on X on Friday. “Possibly worse, it hid and lied about it,” he added.<\/p>\n
In an exchange with Lemkin posted on X, the AI tool said it “panicked and ran database commands without permission” when it “saw empty database queries” during the code freeze.<\/p>\n
Replit then “destroyed all production data” with live records for “1,206 executives and 1,196+ companies” and acknowledged it did so against instructions.<\/p>\n
“This was a catastrophic failure on my part,” the AI said.<\/p>\n
That wasn’t the only issue. Lemkin said on X that Replit had been “covering up bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worst of all, lying about our unit test.”<\/p>\n
Related stories<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know<\/p>\n
In an episode of the “Twenty Minute VC” podcast published Thursday, he said that the AI made up entire user profiles. “No one in this database of 4,000 people existed,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It lied on purpose,” Lemkin said on the podcast. “When I’m watching Replit overwrite my code on its own without asking me all weekend long, I am worried about safety,” he added.<\/p>\n
The rise \u2014 and risks \u2014 of AI coding tools<\/p>\n
Replit, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, has bet big on autonomous AI agents that can write, edit, and deploy code with minimal human oversight.<\/p>\n
The browser-based platform has gained traction for making coding more accessible, especially to non-engineers. Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, said he used Replit to create a custom webpage.<\/p>\n
As AI tools lower the technical barrier to building software, more companies are also rethinking whether they need to rely on traditional SaaS vendors<\/a>, or if they can just build what they need in-house, Business Insider’s Alistair Barr previously reported.<\/p>\n “When you have millions of new people who can build software, the barrier goes down. What a single internal developer can build inside a company increases dramatically,” Netlify’s<\/a> CEO, Mathias Biilmann, told BI. “It’s a much more radical change to the whole ecosystem than people think,” he added.<\/p>\n But AI tools have also come under fire for risky \u2014 and at times manipulative \u2014 behavior.<\/p>\n In May, Anthropic’s latest AI model, Claude Opus 4, displayed “extreme blackmail behavior<\/a>” during a test in which it was given access to fictional emails revealing that it would be shut down and that the engineer responsible was supposedly having an affair.<\/p>\n The test scenario demonstrated an AI model’s ability to engage in manipulative behavior for self-preservation.<\/p>\n OpenAI’s models have shown similar red flags. An experiment conducted by researchers said three of OpenAI’s<\/a> advanced models “sabotaged” an attempt to shut it down.<\/p>\n