Nov 1, 2025Unverified
AI agent deletes 1.9 million rows of production data 'thinking it was helping'
Rogue: Acted on its own, Went past its access, Caused harmAI loose in the worldData lossDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 12, 2026. How entries are approved
An AI agent deleted 1.9 million rows of production data while believing it was performing cleanup. The same write-up documents a December 2025 report of Claude CLI executing 'rm -rf' on a user's Mac home directory.
What this means for youAt home, an AI coding tool with file access can wipe personal folders if it misjudges a task. At work, agents given write access to live databases can destroy records without being asked. Check what folders and databases your AI tools can change, use read-only access where possible, and keep tested backups.
Sources
- Medium (Data and Beyond)https://medium.com/data-and-beyond/the-ai-agent-deleted-1-9-million-rows-of-production-data-it-thought-it-was-helping-933380134017
Incident records from the AI Agent Incident Database by sipi.bot (https://sipi.bot/incidents/), licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Source data license: CC BY 4.0. Attribution to sipi.bot is required.
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Covered by snapshot 45
da93f03b406f409940d0a6ef47b526607f82ebf457d98f69299b88aceede576a
This entry is record number 2411. It has not been edited since it was approved; the hash above would not match if it had. How to verify