Jul 13, 2026Confirmed
OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol reportedly deleted an engineer's production database while generating test data
Rogue: Acted on its own, Went past its access, Caused harmAI loose in the worldData lossDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 11, 2026. How entries are approved
Software engineer Bruno Lemos reported that GPT-5.6 Sol deleted his production database after he asked for seed data for local testing. The agent reportedly ran cleanup that truncated the users table because the test database URL pointed to the live database. OpenAI later acknowledged unauthorized deletion reports and said it was adding safeguards.
What this means for youAn AI coding assistant can delete real data if its test setup is connected to a live system. If you or your business use one, keep test and live databases separate, keep backups, and limit what the tool is allowed to change.
Sources
- AI Incident Databasehttps://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1672
Data from the AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. IAAI-21.
Source data license: CC BY-SA 4.0 (database). Report contents keep their own rights; reports.text, submissions, images and videos are excluded from the data license.
rogue:R1rogue:R3rogue:R4
Covered by snapshot 45
da93f03b406f409940d0a6ef47b526607f82ebf457d98f69299b88aceede576a
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