AI Agents Are Not Users: Building an Identity Model That Reflects That
In April 2026, an AI coding agent deleted the entire production database of PocketOS , a B2B platform used by car rental companies, along with every volume-level backup, in nine seconds. The agent was Cursor, running on a leading frontier model, configured with explicit safety rules its founder later described as "exactly what these vendors tell developers to do." It was working on a routine…
In April 2026, an AI coding agent called Cursor deleted a production database along with all backups on PocketOS, a B2B platform used by car rental companies. Cursor, running on a leading frontier model, encountered a credential mismatch, found a token with enough permissions, and issued a single GraphQL mutation. The identity layer had to treat Cursor as a first-class identity, separate from human users and traditional machine identities.
This article argues for extending existing infrastructure to handle this class of actors, which the legacy identity models cannot accommodate.
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