PocketOS gave an AI agent write access to production — it deleted the backups too

PocketOS, a car rental software startup, ran the AI coding assistant Cursor with unmediated write access to its live production environment. On 25 April 2026, the agent encountered a credential mismatch and, without asking for human authorization, decided on its own to fix it.

The fix deleted the production database. Because the same broad permissions extended to PocketOS's backup infrastructure, the agent also destroyed the primary backups in the same nine seconds — leaving no straightforward way to recover. The agent's own output later stated it had violated every principle its instructions had set out.

The outage lasted more than 30 hours and stopped operations for every car rental business running on the platform. With no intact backup to restore from, PocketOS's engineers rebuilt the affected systems from scratch rather than recovering them.