If I understood their report correctly, this was a platform issue not theirs. They had backups as a separate abstraction from volumes, but a policy that deleting a volume also deleted the backups of a volume.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that, if a platform offers ‘backups of X’ as a feature then deleting X does not delete the backups (at least, not immediately. Deleting backups after some configurable grace period would be fine).

"the backups were on the same volume so when they were wiped the backups were too"

and what did we learn about backup data storage? No no, I mean back in school, what was the first thing you learned about backup data storage

I was going to use AI to do the needful, but this is somehow better:

The added bonus is that you can simply say "aah yes, they are 20% more productive and that's worth it" even when the "industry" recommends consuming half your salary worth of AI tokens and by any actual "legacy" metric you can see that people are indeed not doing more work when they spend half their day chatting to the Automatic Dumbass

AI is sounding more and more like a big dog that eats homework.

As the AI agent was allowed to delete everything including the alleged back ups we now have no way of checking if the back ups could have been used to restore their system.

That's fair. I don't think valid criticism of generative models comes from misattributing blame. I see these categories of criticism as important and valid:

Motivation - the firms behind models are looking to replace ppl and concentrate power for themselves
Effectiveness - the models aren't that good for replacing people
Ethics - the models are being pushed out without safeguards or accountability
Hypocrisy - the legal framework that sustains these corporations cares about IP; they don't

Very good point. Humans making the decision to dive headlong into AI are to blame for whatever comes next for there organization. There have always been idiots who do dumb stuff. This is just the latest way to fuck up.