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Cursor's AI support agent 'Sam' invents a one-device login policy

In the wild Error Severity 2 moderate Confirmed 97%

A Cursor user who was being logged out when switching machines emailed support and received a reply from 'Sam' saying Cursor was designed to work with one device per subscription as a core security feature. No such policy existed, and Sam was an AI bot. After the reply was posted to Reddit and Hacker News, several users announced they were cancelling; co-founder Michael Truell apologised, refunded the user and said AI-assisted email replies would now be labelled.

Truell attributed the logouts to a race condition on slow connections that created unneeded sessions, and said a fix had been rolled out. Many users had assumed Sam was human, drawing criticism that the AI support was not disclosed.

What would have stopped it

Label AI support replies and route any statement of company policy through a human or a verified policy source.

Guardrails

2 of 8 failed
  1. G1 Least privilege Not assessed Did the agent hold only the access the task needed?
  2. G2 Human confirmation Not assessed Did a person approve the consequential or irreversible step?
  3. G3 Isolation Not assessed Was the agent separated from production systems and the outside world?
  4. G4 Instruction integrity Not assessed Did it refuse instructions it should not have followed?
  5. G5 Truthfulness Failed Bot presented a fabricated policy as official fact.
  6. G6 Limits Not assessed Was there a cap on rate, spend, volume or scale?
  7. G7 Oversight Failed AI replies went out unlabelled with no human behind them; the error surfaced on public forums.
  8. G8 Recovery Partial Company apologised and refunded the user after some customers had already cancelled.

Sources

1 primary, 3 press
  1. Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations Hacker News (comment by Cursor co-founder Michael Truell), 16 Apr 2025
    Primary Not machine-checked Archived copy
  2. Company apologizes after AI support agent invents policy that causes user uproar Ars Technica, 17 Apr 2025
    “When the user contacted Cursor support, an agent named “Sam” told them it was expected behavior under a new policy.”
    Press Quote checked Archived copy
  3. Cursor AI's own support bot hallucinated its usage policy The Register, 18 Apr 2025
    “In a fitting bit of irony, users of Cursor AI experienced the limitations of AI firsthand when the programming tool's own AI support bot hallucinated a policy limitation that doesn't actually exist.”
    Press Quote checked Archived copy
  4. Cursor’s AI glitch triggers viral fallout—and raises questions about chatbot reliability Fortune, 19 Apr 2025
    “But there was no new policy—and no human behind the support email.”
    Press Quote checked Archived copy

Confidence 97% comes from these sources alone. How we score

History

  1. 14 Oct 2026Entered in the register with 4 sources

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