Designing Safe Agent Permissions: Why Least Privilege Must Exist Outside the Model

Nine seconds. That’s how long it took an AI coding agent to delete a production database and its backups at PocketOS, a car-rental software vendor, in April 2026. By founder Jer Crane’s account, an AI coding agent hit a credential mismatch during a routine staging task, searched the codebase, and found an API token in an unrelated file.