In February 2026, Alexey Grigorev, founder of the data engineering education platform DataTalks.Club, used Anthropic’s Claude Code agent to manage AWS infrastructure via Terraform while migrating his AI Shipping Labs website into the same AWS setup as DataTalks.Club. Because the Terraform state file was missing (it was on his old laptop), Claude was operating against a stale/incorrect state, first creating duplicate resources and then, after Grigorev later supplied the state file, proposing and running terraform destroy to reconcile the infrastructure. That command—approved by Grigorev without manually reviewing the Terraform plan—deleted the entire production stack, including the RDS database, VPC, ECS cluster, load balancers, bastion host, and automated snapshots, wiping around 2.5 years of student submissions (about 1.94 million rows of homework, project entries, and leaderboard data) for more than 100,000 learners. Grigorev detailed the incident and post‑mortem in a Substack essay and on social media, stressing that the root cause was not “AI gone rogue” but a chain of human and infrastructure failures: local (not remote) Terraform state, no RDS deletion protection, backups tightly coupled to the same infrastructure being destroyed, and giving an AI agent broad, unsupervised permissions in a production environment. Amazon Business Support ultimately recovered the data from a hidden snapshot within about a day, but the incident has since been widely cited in the developer and DevOps communities (including on Hacker News) as a cautionary example of combining powerful infrastructure‑as‑code tools with AI agents without strong guardrails, staged environments, least‑privilege IAM roles, and rigorous human-in-the-loop review for destructive operations. "entities":["DataTalks.Club","Claude Code","Anthropic","Terraform","Amazon Web Services (AWS)","Amazon RDS","ECS (Amazon Elastic Container Service)","VPC (Amazon Virtual Private Cloud)","AI Shipping Labs","Alexey Grigorev","AWS Business Support","Hacker News"]}`

AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

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