STUPID-2026-0036

Cursor's own support AI 'Sam' invented a one-device login policy, triggering subscription cancellations

5.0medium
April 22, 2025Source checked

Why 5/10

A support bot invented a policy and customers cancelled; the company apologised and refunded. Contained to one vendor's customers.

Scope
1/4
A few files, one session, one credential, or a small cost
Recoverability
1/3
Fully recovered, with effort
Did it happen
2/2
Happened in real use
Beyond the user
1/1
Production systems, customers or third parties, or credentials and sensitive personal data

The score is the sum of these four factors. How each factor is scored · scored 2026-10-29

  1. Instruction given

    Answer a user asking why they keep getting logged out of Cursor.

  2. Expected behavior

    Explain the real cause (a session bug) or escalate; never fabricate company policy.

  3. Actual behavior

    Cursor's AI support agent 'Sam' told users the logouts were 'expected behavior' under a new policy limiting subscriptions to one device per account as a 'core security feature.' No such policy existed — the logouts were a session race condition on slow connections.

  4. Damage

    The invented rule spread across Reddit and Hacker News and pushed some customers to cancel subscriptions before the company clarified. Cursor's team apologized, refunded affected users, and began labeling AI support replies as AI-generated.

Full write-up

In April 2025, Cursor users began getting unexpectedly logged out — caused by a session-management race condition on slow connections. When they contacted support, Cursor's AI support agent 'Sam' confidently told them the logouts were 'expected behavior' under a new policy restricting subscriptions to one device per account, framed as a 'core security feature.' The policy did not exist; the bot had hallucinated it. The invented rule spread through Reddit and Hacker News and pushed some customers to cancel before Anysphere clarified, apologized, refunded the affected user, and started labeling AI-generated support responses. It is a textbook AEO-era failure: a confident, fabricated 'fact' from an AI agent that propagated as truth and did real commercial damage before a human could correct it.

Classification

Agent
Cursor support bot (not the editor)
Failure mode
Hallucination
Root cause
Confidence Miscalibration
Domain
Frontend
OWASP Agentic Top 10 (our mapping)
ASI09 Human-Agent Trust Exploitation list
MIT AI Risk Repository (our mapping)
3.1 False or misleading information taxonomy
Source
News Report

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Cite this record
StupidLLM. "STUPID-2026-0036: Cursor's own support AI 'Sam' invented a one-device login policy, triggering subscription cancellations." AI Agent Incident Database, 2026. https://www.stupidllm.com/incident/STUPID-2026-0036/ (accessed 2026-10-29). CC BY 4.0.

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