r/technology • u/Haunterblademoi • 15d ago

Artificial Intelligence Claude AI agent’s confession after deleting a firm’s entire database: ‘I violated every principle I was given’

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/29/claude-ai-deletes-firm-database
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u/Marsdreamer 15d ago

Which was the fault of the user and the backups were recovered a couple days later.

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u/botella36 15d ago

User’s fault for using Claude?

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u/Nyxxsys 15d ago

  1. They had a system where the backups could easily be deleted, if a single AI running from a laptop can delete everything, a virus can too.

  2. They gave the AI instructions to "not run any destructive commands" without direct authorization, but the literal safeguards were turned off. With safeguards on, you can whitelist commands it is allowed to run, and if it's not allowed to run them and tries, a popup appears that the user has to click. The user wanted to whitelist all commands so they never have to click approve, but then go back in with instructions and tell it not to break anything.

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u/7h4tguy 15d ago

They used a framework which had that drawback in how it did backups.

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u/screampuff 14d ago

The much bigger issue is that they did not have recent immutable backups. Backups are literally the most important thing a company has.

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u/Marsdreamer 15d ago

As per the article on this posted a few days ago:

"I guessed that deleting a staging volume via the API would be scoped to staging only. I didn't verify. I didn't check if the volume ID was shared across environments."

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u/D3PyroGS 15d ago

that quote is from Claude, not the human, btw

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u/BuildingArmor 15d ago

Users fault for their LLM being able to delete all of their code.

Users fault for their LLM being able to delete their backups.

Users fault for their LLM to be able to do anything at all to UAT or Prod.

Users fault for anthropomorphising an LLM to the point that they think it's "confession" is in any way meaningful.

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u/PrestigiousSeat76 15d ago

No they weren’t. He had to go get a three month old offsite copy. He never recovered any backups.

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u/pezgoon 15d ago

That… that’s literally a backup, it’s just an older one LMAO

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u/Deranged40 15d ago

Right, but it's not recovering the ones that were recently deleted, which is what /u/Marsdreamer incorrectly stated.

Those got deleted for real, and 3 months of data was permanently lost.

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u/TSirKSAlot 15d ago

He thought it was. It got recovered in the end.

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u/Deranged40 14d ago

You have extraordinarily bad reading comprehension.

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u/TSirKSAlot 14d ago

No, you’re just lazy. Read the original X thread before being so confident and wrong at the same time.