Technology

42838 readers

477 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

alyaza@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org

gyrfalcon@beehaw.org

rs5th@beehaw.org

SemioticStandard@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social

coldredlight@beehaw.org

remington@beehaw.org

Claude AI agent’s confession after deleting a firm’s entire database: ‘I violated every principle I was given’ (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 day ago by girlfreddy@lemmy.ca to c/technology@beehaw.org

48 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It only took nine seconds for an AI coding agent gone rogue to delete a company’s entire production database and its backups, according to its founder. PocketOS, which sells software that car rental businesses rely on, descended into chaos after its databases were wiped, the company’s founder Jeremy Crane said.

The culprit was Cursor, an AI agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model, which is one of the AI industry’s flagship models. As more industries embrace AI in an attempt to automate tasks and even replace workers, the chaos at PocketOS is a reminder of what could go wrong.

Crane said customers of PocketOS’s car rental clients were left in a lurch when they arrived to pick up vehicles from businesses that no longer had access to software that managed reservations and vehicle assignments.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] LukeZaz@beehaw.org 32 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

This right here. Just about everything in here is awful, and implies decision making and thought processes that straight up do not and have never existed in any AI model whatsoever.

What happened was they threw an awfully-scoped statistics model at problems the program couldn't possibly generate good outputs for, and surprise surprise, it generated bad outputs. The part that's of interest is just how bad the output was, and even then, only in a schadenfreude-filled "it was bound to happen eventually" manner.

[–] sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It didn't confess it just outputted more plausible garbage based on inputs.

[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It just agreed with the accusations, because these models do what they're trained to do: Agree with the prompter.

[–] Dymonika@lemmy.ml 2 points 14 hours ago

No, not necessarily; they can easily, even condescendingly go against your view depending on the topic. It really depends on the topic and the conversational flow.