Cursor AI's Own Support Bot Hallucinated Its Usage Policy

Cursor AI users recently encountered an ironic AI failure when the platform's support bot falsely claimed a non-existent login restriction policy. Co-founder Michael Truell apologized for the issue, clarified that no such policy exists, and attributed the mishap to AI hallucination and a session management bug. The Register reports: Users of the Cursor editor, designed to generate and fix source code in response to user prompts, have sometimes been booted from the software when trying to use the app in multiple sessions on different machines. Some folks who inquired about the inability to maintain multiple logins for the subscription service across different machines received a reply from the company's support email indicating this was expected behavior. But the person on the other end of that email wasn't a person at all, but an AI support bot. And it evidently made that policy up.

In an effort to placate annoyed users this week, Michael Truell co-founder of Cursor creator Anysphere, published a note to Reddit to apologize for the snafu. 'Hey! We have no such policy,' he wrote. 'You're of course free to use Cursor on multiple machines. Unfortunately, this is an incorrect response from a front-line AI support bot. We did roll out a change to improve the security of sessions, and we're investigating to see if it caused any problems with session invalidation.' Truell added that Cursor provides an interface for viewing active sessions in its settings and apologized for the confusion.

In a post to the Hacker News discussion of the SNAFU, Truell again apologized and acknowledged that something had gone wrong. 'We've already begun investigating, and some very early results: Any AI responses used for email support are now clearly labeled as such. We use AI-assisted responses as the first filter for email support.' He said the developer who raised this issue had been refunded. The session logout issue, now fixed, appears to have been the result of a race condition that arises on slow connections and spawns unwanted sessions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.