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

submitted 2 days ago by girlfreddy@lemmy.ca to c/technology@beehaw.org

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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.

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[–] fodor@lemmy.zip 21 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It's not a "confession". Don't abuse the English language. The AI system doesn't have a conscience, so it can't feel guilty or feel bad or apologetic. It is incapable of confessing to things. All it can do is "say" or "write".

Similarly, AI agents don't "hallucinate". They can't have "hallucinations" because they don't have a conception of reality to begin with. Rather, they have "errors" and "error rates".

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 2 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

An AI researcher explained hallucinations as lying when it doesn't know, because we train it on truth and lies to hone the model, so it "learns" that misinformation is part of the mess. I.e. training it on what a tiger looks like. To hone that we may feed it zebras, or optical illusion things in a tiger data set to test its internal "what is a tiger" true false ranking, so it learns that non tiger things are in the fuzzy zone. And later may draw from that, and eager to provide an answer throws in garbage it has also "seen"

[–] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 8 points 1 day ago

Also wrong. An error for an llm is if it fails to return random text based on the supplied context. You have an error rate as a user applying that random text to your systems.