All posts tagged: Blundering

Amazon’s Blundering AI Caused Multiple AWS Outages

Amazon’s Blundering AI Caused Multiple AWS Outages

Arda Kucukkaya / Anadolu via Getty Images Are AI tools reliable enough to be used at in commercial settings? If so, should they be given “autonomy” to make decisions? These are the questions being raised after at least two internet outages at Amazon’s cloud division were allegedly caused by blundering AI agents, according to new reporting from the Financial Times. In one incident in December, engineers at Amazon Web Services allowed its in-house Kiro “agentic” coding tool to make changes that sparked a 13-hour disruption, according to four sources familiar with the matter. The AI, ill-fatedly, had decided to “delete and recreate the environment,” the sources said. Amazon employees claimed that this was not the first service disruption involving an AI tool.  “We’ve already seen at least two production outages [in the past few months],” one senior AWS employee told the FT. “The engineers let the AI [agent] resolve an issue without intervention. The outages were small but entirely foreseeable.” AWS launched its in-house coding assistant, Kiro, in July. The company describes the tool as …

Blundering Husband Asks Claude AI to “Organize” Wife’s PC, Accidentally Erases Her Life’s Work

Blundering Husband Asks Claude AI to “Organize” Wife’s PC, Accidentally Erases Her Life’s Work

One of the core promises of the AI industry is that its tools can automate work for you and perform entire tasks without intervention. Oftentimes, however, the stuff that today’s AI will do on your behalf is less than helpful — or even so comically harmful that you’d be better off just doing a task yourself. A developer learned this lesson the hard way when using Anthropic’s new Claude Cowork model, which was seen as being so potentially disruptive when it was released that it sent the stock market into a days-long panic. Maybe someone should check if a blundering AI agent isn’t secretly in control of the whole market. The developer, Nick Davidov, claims he simply asked the Claude AI to “organize” his wife’s desktop, before it suddenly wiped out nearly two decades of precious family memories his wife had documented. “I need to stop and be honest with you about something important,” Claude began, according to a screenshot. “I made a mistake while reorganizing the photos.” “My script ran rm -rf on what …