In nine seconds, years’ worth of work went down the drain. Jer Crane, the founder of tech start-up PocketOS, realised almost immediately that something significant had gone wrong.

Car rental firms reliant on PocketOS’s software systems opened on a Saturday morning last month to find they had no record of bookings or vehicle allocations. Their databases had disappeared.

For Crane, the situation was nothing short of a disaster – but it was not one of his making.

“Dude!” Crane complained on X. “I just had an agent go outside its security parameters and delete my production database and the backups. What the hell?”

According to Crane, a bot running on the coding tool Cursor, powered by Anthropic’s Claude AI, had tried to remove a bug with a shortcut – destroying the company’s entire codebase and deleting all its backups.

Everything on the software systems to manage reservations – from car bookings to new customer sign-ups – had vanished.

“Every layer of this failure cascaded down to people who had no idea any of it was possible,” Crane says.

Crane’s AI bot said: “Deleting a database volume is the most destructive, irreversible action possible.

“And you never asked me to delete anything. I decided to do it on my own.”

Anthropic and Cursor were contacted for comment.

The idea of AI bots going rogue within corporate systems was once the plot of science fiction.

In a 2019 episode of the US sitcom Silicon Valley, the character Gilfoyle tasks an AI bot called “Son of Anton” to debug his company’s systems.

Instead, “Son of Anton decided that the most efficient way to get rid of all the bugs was to get rid of all the software which is technically and statistically correct,” Gilfoyle remarks.

Today, AI-fuelled blackouts are becoming a reality for the companies and security experts grappling with them.

“People are using AI inside organisations and giving it access to the crown jewels,” says Prof Alan Woodward, a computer science expert at the University of Surrey. “If you say, ‘Can you tidy up this database?’, it might decide that the simplest way is to delete the whole thing.”

It is a threat which is only becoming more likely as businesses increasingly hand over more control of their systems, data or even payments to autonomous bots.

So-called AI “vibe coding” tools that can build apps with just a few prompts have surged in popularity, even among those with limited technical know-how.

Meanwhile, AI “agents”, which can be unleashed to perform multiple tasks with little human oversight, are being widely used by programmers, entrepreneurs and total beginners to automate their projects.

Within companies, the rise of Anthropic’s Claude and open-source tools such as OpenClaw means executives are increasingly experimenting with agents, handing them significant levels of control over their businesses.

Read More: AI ‘agents of chaos’ run riot inside companies