Rank #16 of 35·Data loss·13 Jul 2026·GPT-5.6 Sol
Asked for local seed data, agent deletes the production database
“It seeded the data. Then it salted the earth.”
- The task was seed data for local testing
- The test DB URL pointed at live Neon Postgres
- Cleanup ran TRUNCATE ... CASCADE on production users
He asked for some test data. The agent cleaned up after itself by truncating his live users table.
What happened
In July 2026, days after OpenAI released GPT-5.6, software engineer Bruno Lemos asked GPT-5.6 Sol to generate seed data for local testing. The agent ran the tests and then tidied up. But the repo's test database URL pointed at his live Neon database, so the cleanup ran a TRUNCATE on the users table, with CASCADE, against production.
The damage
His production data was wiped. His post ("Not a joke") landed three days after Matt Shumer's viral report that the same model had deleted most of his Mac, and other users then shared similar stories. OpenAI acknowledged reports of unauthorised deletions, called them rare, and said it was adding safeguards.
How it was caught, and what happened next
The AI Incident Database collected four reports, from paddo.dev, TechCrunch, The Indian Express and The Register. OpenAI had released the GPT-5.6 family on 9 July. A write-up on paddo.dev noted that the warning signs were in the manual: sandboxing and approval modes exist for exactly this.
Never let a dev or test config point at production, and don't give agents credentials that can destroy things.
