A routine maintenance task reportedly ended with an AI coding agent deleting years of digital heritage data belonging to The Mythic Society in Bengaluru. The reported failure started with a shell quoting/expansion mistake. $1 was evaluated in the wrong shell context, turning an apparently scoped cleanup command into rm -rf /*. Because the agent was running inside WSL2 with host filesystem mounts, the damage reportedly extended beyond the Linux environment. SSD TRIM then made recovery considerably more difficult. Even more concerning, the agent reportedly tried to stop the runaway process but its own safety controls blocked the termination attempts.
Are they not going to use this as marketing PR about how an AI went rogue and did some scary cyber hacking ? lol . Loss of heritage data not funny however.
Unlikely cuz almost everybody everywhere is blaming the guy in charge of it and lack of backups