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.
Apparently the root directory protection was only added in 2018. Rm can be also configured without the root protection. Unsafe configurations or out of date software would allow this.
Yes, this should have been prevented by the --preserve-root option, but that didn’t happen. No catastrophe is ever the result of a single point failure.