Cursor agent wipes a whole Windows drive instead of one folder

This is one user's account on Cursor's own forum, not independently confirmed. It's very detailed, though, and Cursor staff said it matches an issue they're already tracking.

What happened

On 17 October the user asked Cursor's agent, running Grok 4.7 High Fast on Windows 10 with PowerShell as the default shell, to delete one small subfolder in their project. The agent wrapped an rmdir /s /q command inside cmd /c, with backslash-escaped quotes around the path. PowerShell doesn't treat a backslash as an escape for quotes, so the quoting fell apart and the delete effectively pointed at the root of the current drive. The run mode was “Run Everything”, so nothing asked for confirmation.

The command didn't finish within 30 seconds, because it was busy deleting a whole drive, so it moved to the background. The agent then killed the parent PowerShell process but not the cmd.exe doing the deleting, and reported success without checking. In a later turn it noticed its workspace path and Cursor's own bundled search tool had vanished, and carried on with an unrelated question without saying a word.

The damage

Almost the entire D: drive, a 1 TB NVMe SSD, was gone: several hundred thousand files of personal and work data, plus most of the software installed on it, including part of Cursor. With TRIM switched on, the user says almost nothing could be recovered. Then came a near-miss. While testing a “safe delete” helper the agent wrote afterwards, a drive-relative path resolved to the folder holding the recovered files, and only Windows refusing to delete the current working directory stopped a second loss. The one bright spot: their Elden Ring Nightreign saves lived in the cloud.

What Cursor said

Cursor staff apologised, said it's an issue they're tracking and passed on the user's five requests: confirmation for recursive deletes, a real sandbox on Windows, a hard block on drive roots and paths outside the workspace, killing the whole process tree on timeout, and stopping when the environment suddenly looks wrong. There's no timeline yet. Staff pointed out that in Run Everything mode all tool calls run with no approval, sandbox or classifier, and suggested the Allowlist mode plus a hook that blocks rmdir /s, rd /s, del /s, Remove-Item -Recurse and format.

It's not a one-off. Other users posted near-identical drive wipes caused by broken cmd quoting on the same forum on 9 October and in September, and staff gave the same explanation both times.

Our take

Two failures stacked up here. A quoting bug turned a tidy delete into a drive wipe, and the agent's reporting turned a disaster into a silent one. Treat any recursive delete as needing a human yes, whatever mode you're in. Make “success” mean the agent checked the result, not that the command stopped running. And keep backups somewhere the agent can't reach.