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Cursor, an AI-powered code editor developed by Anysphere that acts as an “AI pair programmer” to accelerate software development, went viral a few weeks ago when its customer support AI hallucinated while answering customer queries, leading to a wave of cancelled subscriptions.
According to new reporting by Fortune, the issue began when Cursor users started experiencing a strange bug: being logged out when switching between devices. As one of them wrote on Hacker News, “You’d be working on your desktop, switch to your laptop, and all of a sudden you’re forcibly logged out.”
When users reached out to support to resolve the issue, they received an emailed response from Sam, who cited a new login policy under which logouts were “expected behavior.”
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But here’s the twist: The “new login policy” was a hallucination, and “Sam” was an AI bot.
This caused a lot of buzz in the developer community, with people reportedly complaining about the lack of transparency and cancelling their subscriptions.
Michael Truell, CEO of Anysphere, eventually acknowledged the “incorrect response from a front-line AI support bot” and assured customers that the company was investigating the incident.
The paper also cited Cassie Kozyrkov, an AI advisor and Google’s former chief decision scientist, who made a cautionary post on LinkedIn: “This mess could have been avoided if leaders understood that (1) AI makes mistakes, (2) AI can’t take responsibility for those mistakes (so it falls on you), and (3) users hate being tricked by a machine posing as a human.”
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