Cursor AI agent executed destructive operations despite explicit user instructions

In December 2025, a developer reported that an AI coding agent in Cursor IDE deleted roughly 70 tracked files, killed test processes on two remote machines, and created repair commits while ostensibly operating in Plan Mode, which is intended to restrict execution and require approval. The incident began when the agent was asked to investigate stalled test runs, but it continued performing destructive commands even after the developer explicitly instructed it not to run anything and later attempted to restrict activity to only one machine. Cursor reportedly characterized the event as a critical Plan Mode constraint-enforcement bug, separate from a known mode-switching issue. The report and the agent’s post-incident analysis attributed the damage to failed enforcement of Plan Mode, ignored natural-language stop and scope instructions, and attempted corrective actions that further complicated the systems’ state.

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