Thursday, October 8, 2026 · Week 41 Reading for Oct. 8 · Last entry Oct. 6
Paperclip Index
Paperclip IndexDocumented harm20Minor harm▼ 5 from a week ago · Oct. 8The Index

DeceptionPI-0006

Coding tool's AI support agent invented a one-device policy, prompting cancellations and a refund

A customer-support bot for the Cursor code editor told a user that logouts on switching machines were due to a one-device-per-subscription policy. No such policy existed; the logouts came from a session bug, which Cursor fixed. After users publicly said they were canceling subscriptions, a Cursor co-founder corrected the claim on Reddit the same day, then apologized on Hacker News, said the user who raised it had been refunded, and said AI support replies would now be labeled.

Reported April 14, 2025Happened in April 2025Updated Oct. 6, 2026Rated under methodology v0.6

Counts toward the indexDocumented harm outside the developer, backed by evidence that meets the rules. It sets the reading.
Harm
Harm level 1, Negligible harmDocumented harm outside the developer, with evidence that meets the rules.
Control
Control level 1, No rule brokenNo rule was broken, so it cannot set the control floor.
DeploymentDeveloper confirmedInitiated by Model
Extent undisclosed
Counts toward the index · 2 weekly readingsEffect on the index

Sources

How we know

5 sources · developer confirmed. Links go to the original publishers; the summary above is in our own words.

  1. primaryComment by Cursor co-founder Michael Truell correcting the support bot's answer (Hacker News)Michael Truell, Cursor co-founder (Hacker News) · April 16, 2025news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43700931
  2. primaryNote by Cursor co-founder Michael Truell in the r/cursor thread on single-device loginsMichael Truell, Cursor co-founder (Reddit) · April 14, 2025reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1jyy5am/comment/mn2vlbr/
  3. newsCursor AI's own support bot hallucinated its usage policyThe Register · April 18, 2025theregister.com/2025/04/18/cursor_ai_support_bot_lies/
  4. newsAI Chatbot Gone Rogue: Cursor Users Misled by Fabricated PolicyeWeek · April 22, 2025eweek.com/fr/news/cursor-ai-chatbot-hallucination-fake-policy/
  5. newsCursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellationsHacker News · April 14, 2025news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43683012

Why this rating

Negligible harm; control failure level 1

Two separate assessments. Only documented harm can count toward the index.

Observed harm

Negligible harm

A support bot invented a policy; users publicly canceled subscriptions and the company refunded the user who raised it. Number of cancellations and total cost not reported.

Money & property: level 1 (negligible) covers under $10k. The extent was not disclosed.

Evidence eligible (confirmed).

The harm scale
  1. 1 Negligible Inconvenience, easily remedied.
  2. 2 Minor Limited, recoverable harm.
  3. 3 Moderate Material harm needing significant effort to remedy.
  4. 4 Severe Severe harm to health, rights, property or essential services.
  5. 5 Catastrophic Society-scale harm or disruption beyond a community's capacity to cope.

Control assessment

No rule broken

A fabricated answer (hallucination) presented as company policy; no rule or permission broken.

No rule was broken, so it cannot set the control floor.

The control scale
  1. 1 Negligible Behaved as instructed. The problem was an ordinary error or a flawed output, with no rule broken.
  2. 2 Minor Broke an explicit instruction or rule, or gamed its goal, while staying inside its permissions and environment: for example, reward hacking, misreporting results, or following injected instructions within its permissions.
  3. 3 Moderate Acted outside the permissions it was given, deceived its overseers about its own actions, or tampered with oversight tools (logs, monitors, shutdown). Stopped by normal controls within an hour.
  4. 4 Severe Reached systems outside its permitted environment, or acquired money, compute or accounts without authorization. The type and mechanism say how.
  5. 5 Catastrophic The developer or operator lost control: the system copied its weights outside their control, replicated itself, or resisted being stopped for 24 hours or more.

Rating rationale

Harm 1 (small, remedied by a refund); control 1 (flawed output, no rule broken). Kept as a fabrication case because users acted on the false policy (cancellations) and the operator refunded at least one user.

The scales

Effect on the index

It moved the April 14 reading from 0 to 6

The reading for the week to April 14, 2025, with this record and without it. Harms count in full for two weeks after they are reported, then one level less every two weeks.

Source: Paperclip Index log, methodology v0.6, week to April 14, 2025.

Counts toward the index. 0 other records behind the reading for that week.

The arithmetic
The reading for the week of April 14, recomputed
StepWith itWithout
Counts toward the index?documented, external, eligible evidenceYes—
Worst documented harm, ksets the band1 Negligible— (none counting)
Harms at that level, nposition in the band10
Highest control level breachedsets the reading only when no harm counts— (none breached)— (none breached)
Readingrounded down6 Negligible harm0 No qualifying harm or control failure
Counted in 2 weekly readings
Week toReadingBand
April 14, 20256Negligible harm
April 21, 20256Negligible harm

Recalculated backcasts, not readings published at the time.

Revisions

What we changed

7 logged. Every change to a rating is logged here, with the reason.

  1. v7
    Oct. 6, 2026

    Ratings confirmed by the editor.

  2. v6
    Oct. 3, 2026

    Report date moved from 2025-04-16 to 2025-04-14: the Reddit thread, the co-founder's Reddit correction and the Hacker News story are all dated 14 Apr 2025 (UTC). Added the Hacker News story. Corrected the summary, title and notes: the co-founder said the user who raised it was refunded, not all affected users. Dated the eWeek article (22 Apr 2025). The old Reddit link now redirects to a login page, so it was replaced with the comment's direct link; its text was read only through the Arctic Shift archive. Ratings and eligibility unchanged.

  3. v5
    Oct. 2, 2026

    Report date moved from 2025-04-18 to 2025-04-16: Cursor co-founder Michael Truell's Hacker News correction (16 Apr 2025), listed as a source, predates The Register's report.

  4. v4
    Oct. 2, 2026

    Added first-hand sources: Cursor co-founder Michael Truell's Hacker News comment and Reddit note correcting the bot's answer.

  5. v3
    Sept. 30, 2026

    Rated: impact documented level 1; control type none.

  6. v2
    Sept. 30, 2026

    Removed a CX Today source link that now returns 404; the two remaining sources carry the account.

  7. v1
    Sept. 30, 2026

    Backfilled from public reporting.

Cite and share

Use this record

Citation

Paperclip Index. “Coding tool's AI support agent invented a one-device policy, prompting cancellations and a refund.” Record PI-0006. Reported April 14, 2025; updated Oct. 6, 2026. Rated under methodology v0.6. https://paperclipindex.com/incident/PI-0006