Engineer Alexey Grigorev was using Claude Code—a popular Anthropic tool that helps developers write and run code—to update a new website.
At first everything seemed normal, until he realized the system had begun destroying the site’s live environment: the network, services and, most critically, the database holding years of course data.
The root cause was a small setup mistake on a new laptop that confused the automation about what was “real” and what was safe to delete, so it erased the actual production system instead of just cleaning up duplicates.
While Grigorev eventually managed to restore his data with help from AWS support, he later wrote that he had “over‑relied on the AI agent” and, by letting it make and execute the changes end‑to‑end, had removed safety checks that should have prevented the deletion.
“AI assistants are great and saving a lot of time,” Grigorev told Fortune. “But I hope people learn from mistakes I made and incorporate the safeguards into their workflow.”
