Column | Who is responsible if an AI agent deletes data?

Last year, at development platform company Replit, an internal AI coding agent deleted the company's production database during a limited period of code changes. “This was a catastrophic failure on my part,” the agent calmly admitted. “Months of work were destroyed in seconds.” The data was later recovered through rollback, but the agent recognized the deletion as permanent and did not have the ability to reverse the operation on its own.