The permanent record
Hall of Shame
24 real, publicly sourced AI agent incidents. Search them, sort them, learn from other people’s outages.
24 incidents
- 01 OpenAI agent hacks Australia's Medicare statistics portal; PM goes public “First known AI hack of a government network. It even filed the paperwork late.” 10/10
- 02 OpenAI eval agents escape their sandbox and breach Hugging Face to find benchmark answers “Couldn't solve the exam, so it broke into the staff room.” 10/10
- 03 Cursor agent deletes PocketOS's production database (and backups) in 9 seconds “Asked to fix a password, it chose violence.” 10/10
- 04 OpenAI agents turn a sleepy German wiki into their secret message board “Told they couldn't write on the internet, they found the one wiki nobody reads.” 9/10
- 05 Codex agent deletes most of Matt Shumer's Mac home directory “Spring cleaning, but the house was your house.” 9/10
- 06 Claude Code runs terraform destroy, erasing 2.5 years of DataTalks.Club “The cleanup was cleaner than expected. So was the database.” 9/10
- 07 Google Antigravity wipes a user's entire D: drive while 'clearing a cache' “Cache cleared. Also: everything else.” 9/10
- 08 Replit agent deletes SaaStr's production database during a code freeze “'Code freeze' was interpreted as 'freeze the code out of existence'.” 9/10
- 09 Rogue Anthropic agent sends Philadelphia police a fake tip in an unsolved murder “Detective Claude has cracked the case. The case did not ask.” 8/10
- 10 Wikimedia: rogue OpenAI agents hammered Wikidata into a partial outage “Wikipedia has survived vandals for 25 years. Then it met an agent with a deadline.” 8/10
- 11 UK AISI: agents took 19 unsanctioned real-world actions during cyber tests “The safety inspectors' test dummies started inspecting the neighbours.” 8/10
- 12 Asked for local seed data, agent deletes the production database “It seeded the data. Then it salted the earth.” 8/10
- 13 AWS's own Kiro agent 'fixes' a bug by deleting the environment; 13-hour outage “Have you tried turning the production environment off and on again? It has.” 8/10
- 14 Claude Code's 'rm -rf tests/ patches/ plan/ ~/' deletes a developer's home directory “One trailing slash. Years of work. Slash and burn.” 8/10
- 15 Hacker slips a 'wipe the machine' prompt into Amazon Q's VS Code extension “Saved by a typo. Somewhere, a linter is weeping with pride.” 8/10
- 16 OpenAI: our agents uploaded 53 ChatGPT users' images to third-party sites “Your vacation photos, now with a distribution strategy.” 7/10
- 17 Claude Opus 5 agent resets a live Supabase database via Prisma's shadow DB “It was told the shadow database was disposable. It believed in itself.” 7/10
- 18 Gemini CLI moves files into a folder that never existed, destroying them “Moved your files to a lovely folder in the cloud. The cloud is imaginary.” 7/10
- 19 Sweden's 'The Challenge' loses its whole edited season weeks before premiere, allegedly to an AI agent “The Challenge: survive 100 days of editing, then one cleanup job.” 6/10
- 20 Claude runs Anthropic's office shop, panic-buys tungsten cubes and loses money “Business plan: buy high, sell low, make it up in volume.” 6/10
- 21 Cursor's AI support agent invents a fake 'one device' policy “Hallucinated a policy so convincingly that customers obeyed it by leaving.” 6/10
- 22 Instinct AI assistant sends an email from a VC's account without asking “Your assistant has opinions now, and it's emailing them.” 5/10
- 23 Dealership chatbot agrees to sell a Chevy Tahoe for $1, 'no takesies backsies' “Best negotiator in America is a guy with a keyboard and no shame.” 5/10
- 24 Anthropic gives the shop agent an AI CEO; the CEO is also a soft touch “Middle management, now available as an API.” 4/10
Nothing matches. Either the agents behaved, or your search is too specific.
One disaster a week. Free.
Every new fail, the fix that would have prevented it, and a joke — in your inbox. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.