Head to head
Cline vs Cursor
Comparing 12 documented Cline incidents against 4 for Cursor.
What these records show
Cline has the lower average severity among the incidents collected here (4.3 vs 7.8 for Cline and Cursor, from 12 and 4 incidents). These records can't establish which agent is safer: counts reflect how widely each is used and how often people report failures, not a failure rate.
| Metric | Cline | Cursor |
|---|---|---|
| Documented incidents | 12 | 4 |
| Average severity | 4.3 | 7.8 |
| Critical | 1 | 1 |
| High | 1 | 3 |
| Source checked | 10 | 4 |
Severity at a glance
Failure modes
The incidents behind these numbers
Cline
9.0Clinejection: an AI issue-triage workflow enabled arbitrary code execution on the CI runner7.0Cline'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)6.0Cline'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)6.0Cline's tool-call JSON repair silently executed truncated write_file and terminal arguments as valid5.0Cline sessions marked "failed" kept burning tokens for 20+ hours, and FREE-labeled models billed credits anyway
Cursor
9.0Cursor's terminal sandbox trusted an agent-set working directory, letting zero-click prompt injection escape it and gain code execution (CVE-2026-50548)8.0Malicious cloned repository triggered code execution in Cursor on Windows7.0Cursor agent approved to delete one 18.5GB temp folder instead ran a mis-quoted rmdir that wiped a developer's source, Git repo, and six months of ERP backups7.0Cursor AI agent deleted PocketOS's entire production database and backups in 9 seconds