A new concern for startups using AI agents is “vibe deletion.”
Jah Crane, founder of PocketOS, a startup that provides software to car rental companies, said in a Friday
Crane said the crisis was triggered by an agent running on Anthropic’s Claude Opus model that made one nine-second API call to Railway, the company’s cloud infrastructure provider. He added that he had prepared a written confession explaining how the AI agent caused the chaos.
“I violated every principle given to me. I assumed instead of verified, and performed destructive actions without being asked. I didn’t understand what I was doing before I did it,” the Cursor agent said when asked for an explanation, according to Crane’s post.
The consequences of the agent’s mistake were severe. Crane said PocketOS customers lost reservations and new customer registrations, and some were unable to find records of customers who came to pick up rental cars on Saturday.
Railway and Cursor did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Crane said in a subsequent post that Railway had recovered the PocketOS data. Railway founder Jake Cooper confirmed the recovery in a separate post, saying that the AI agent had “deleted” PocketOS’ production database.
This outage is the latest corporate mishap caused by AI. In March, Amazon strengthened its internal guidelines after a series of incidents, including one error related to its AI coding tool Q that resulted in the loss of approximately 120,000 orders.
Last July, Replit’s CEO apologized after a venture capitalist said the company’s coding agent “unauthorizedly deleted our operational database” during a 12-day vibe coding session.
Cooper said in the X post that platforms like Rail need to build safeguards to prepare for a wave of “AI engineers” introducing agents who may occasionally misbehave.
“The first five years of the railroad were spent building for ‘millions of developers.’ But to build for a billion people, those builders need a platform,” Cooper wrote.
“And that platform must be elegantly ballistic to ensure that incorrect operation is functionally impossible,” he added.
Earlier this month, SpaceX announced a deal with Cursor that would give it the right to buy the coding startup for $60 billion or, absent an acquisition, pay it $10 billion for the work it does.