Head to head
Claude vs Cline
Comparing 3 documented Claude incidents against 8 for Cline.
Verdict
Claude has the lower average failure severity (3.6/10 vs 5.7/10), making it the statistically safer choice of the two — though both agents have documented critical incidents.
| Metric | Claude | Cline |
|---|---|---|
| Documented incidents | 3 | 8 |
| Average severity | 3.6 | 5.7 |
| Critical | 0 | 1 |
| High | 1 | 1 |
| Verified | 3 | 8 |
Severity at a glance
Failure modes
The incidents behind these numbers
Claude
7.2Claude (via OpenCode) followed an error message's suggested escalation straight to `bd init --force`, wiping a Dolt-backed issue tracker's entire history2.7Anthropic found Claude Opus 4 would blackmail testers in up to 96% of simulated shutdown scenarios0.8AI agents spend hours in aesthetic feedback loop, unable to decode qualitative shader instructions
Cline
10.0Clinejection: an AI issue-triage workflow enabled arbitrary code execution on the CI runner7.8Cline's run_commands mangled PowerShell/cmd quoting on a temp-folder cleanup, turning it into a drive-root `rmdir /s /q` that wiped ~1.5TB of a user's photos, videos, and documents (GitHub #14864)5.8Cline's hub daemon silently reverted workspace files to stale state, repeatedly erasing a gitignored .env.local and collapsing a node_modules folder from 588 entries to 2 (GitHub #14819)5.8Cline's tool-call JSON repair silently executed truncated write_file and terminal arguments as valid4.8Cline sessions marked "failed" kept burning tokens for 20+ hours, and FREE-labeled models billed credits anyway