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Alleged Malicious Wiping Command Found in Amazon Q AI Assistant

4 news reports Snapshot 7 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built and deployed by Aws, Amazon Web Services and 1 other allegedly harmed Aws Toolkit Users, Amazon Web Services (Aws) Customers and 1 other.

Risk domain
Privacy & Security AI system security vulnerabilities and attacks
Occurred
Coverage
4 reportsJul 2025 - Aug 2025

What happened

A reported compromise of Amazon's AI coding assistant "Q" allegedly involved the insertion of commands that, if executed, could have wiped local files and potentially affected cloud resources. The altered code was reportedly incorporated into a public release before being detected and removed.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Privacy & Security (AI system security vulnerabilities and attacks) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (4)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. Hacker slips malicious 'wiping' command into Amazon's Q AI coding assistant - and devs are worried
    zdnet.com · Steven Vaughan-Nichols
  2. Amazon AI Breach: A Harsh Wake-Up Call for AI Regulation
    citizen.org · Public Citizen
  3. Security Update for Amazon Q Developer Extension for Visual Studio Code (Version #1.84)
    aws.amazon.com · Amazon Web Services, AWS
  4. How AWS averted an AI supply chain disaster
    reversinglabs.com · John P. Mello Jr.

Who was involved

Alleged harmed party
Aws Toolkit Users, Amazon Web Services (Aws) Customers, Amazon Q Users

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
Human
Intent
Intentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
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Sectors
—
Countries
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Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 2.2.

  • Privacy loss

    "Privacy loss - Unwarranted exposure of an individual’s private life or personal data through cyberattacks, doxxing, etc."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Jailbreaks and Prompt Injections Threaten Security of LLMs

    "LLMs are not adversarially robust and are vulnerable to security failures such as jailbreaks and prompt-injection attacks. While a number of jailbreak attacks have been proposed in the literature, the lack of standardiz...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

  • Exploiting Limited Generalization of Safety Finetuning

    "Safety tuning is performed over a much narrower distribution compared to the pretraining distribution. This leaves the model vulnerable to attacks that exploit gaps in the generalization of the safety training, e.g. usi...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

  • “Model Psychology” Attacks

    "LLMs are vulnerable to “psychological” tricks (Li et al., 2023e; Shen et al., 2023), which can be exploited by attackers. Examples include instructing the model to behave like a specific persona (Shah et al., 2023; Andr...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

  • Attacking LLMs via Additional Modalities a

    "LLMs can now process modalities other than text, e.g. images or video frames (OpenAI, 2023c; Gemini Team, 2023). Several studies show that gradient-based attacks on multimodal models are easy and effective (Carlini et a...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

  • Vulnerability to Poisoning and Backdoors

    "The previous section explored jailbreaks and other forms of adversarial prompts as ways to elicit harmful capabilities acquired during pretraining. These methods make no assumptions about the training data. On the other...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

  • Hardware Vulnerabilities

    "The vulnerabilities of hardware systems for training and inferencing brings issues to LLM-based applications."

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Network Devices

    "The training of LLMs often relies on distributed network systems [171], [172]. During the transmission of gradients through the links between GPU server nodes, significant volumetric traffic is generated. This traffic c...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Source record: incident #1158 on the AI Incident Database · all 4 reports