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Key Bridge Nightmare: Contractor Dropped After Costs Spiral

Zero Rss
3 months 2 weeks ago
Key Bridge Nightmare: Contractor Dropped After Costs Spiral

Left-wing Gov. Wes Moore's claim that the Francis Scott Key Bridge rebuild is the "fastest-moving large infrastructure project in the United States" just hit a major roadblock.

Fox Baltimore's Gary Collins reports that Maryland officials canceled Kiewit Infrastructure Co.'s contract for Phase 2 of the bridge rebuild, the construction phase, after the contractor's proposal reportedly far exceeded state estimates.

BREAKING NEWS: The contract for Phase 2 for the Francis Scott Key Bridge rebuild has been officially cancelled.

The contract is expected to go up for rebid beginning in May. https://t.co/WdquWgcvg8

— Gary M. Collins (@realgarycollins) April 28, 2026

This massive setback raises new questions about whether Moore's administration can actually control costs, properly manage the rebuild, and deliver the "fastest-moving large infrastructure project in the U.S.," given ballooning expenses.

Collins quoted U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who explained the decision to remove Kiewit after its Phase 2 proposal "far exceeded" state estimates. Those estimates have surged from roughly $1.8 billion to more than $5.2 billion.

Phase 2 of the rebuild would have included final design work, steel-pile installation in the Patapsco River, roadway approaches, and bridge-span construction. Now, Moore's administration must scramble to find a new contractor.

Let’s get it!

The Key Bridge no longer under contract 🤯@WCBM680 https://t.co/9fWKpMVCAC pic.twitter.com/5T1cn7M5gr

— Kimberly Klacik (@kimKBaltimore) April 29, 2026

Duffy stated in a federal announcement that the project has been plagued from the beginning by ballooning costs and delays.

"The Trump Administration is always working to secure the best possible team for hardworking American taxpayers," Duffy continued. "It's my job to ensure the American people's tax dollars are used efficiently and that major projects are completed on time and on budget."

He added, "We're putting taxpayers and their priorities first."

Moore said the state remains committed to rebuilding the bridge "safely, quickly, and cost-efficiently," but the cancellation challenges his repeated claim that the project is one of the nation's fastest-moving major infrastructure efforts.

From @GovWesMoore: pic.twitter.com/nq2fou67P6

— Gary M. Collins (@realgarycollins) April 28, 2026

In October, Duffy stated that Moore "hasn't been a good steward with the money. We have also sent a letter to all of our partners saying they have to follow the law. A long time ago, we got rid of contracting based on race and sex."

More than two years after the container ship hit the bridge - there is still no replacement span. Moore's polling numbers are sliding, residents are frustrated with mounting crises plaguing the state, and the latest contract setback only reinforces the perception of dysfunction in the one-party-ruled state by unhinged Democratic Party kings and queens.

Related:

The result here is growing public anger, eroding confidence in state leadership, and now residents fleeing the sinking state.

Tyler Durden Wed, 04/29/2026 - 11:55
Tyler Durden

AI Agent Deletes Startup's Database In 9 Seconds, Founder Says

Zero Rss
3 months 2 weeks ago
AI Agent Deletes Startup's Database In 9 Seconds, Founder Says

Authored by Jason Nelson via Decrypt.co,

  • PocketOS founder Jeremy Crane claims a Cursor agent running Anthropic’s Claude Opus deleted his company’s production database and backups in nine seconds.

  • Crane said the AI later produced a written explanation admitting it violated multiple safety rules.

  • The incident raises questions about AI coding tools, Railway’s infrastructure design, and safeguards around destructive API actions.

A software company founder claims an AI coding agent destroyed his firm’s production database, then copped to the mistake and explained how it happened, demonstrating the potential danger of entrusting sensitive access and materials to automated bots.

Jeremy Crane, founder of PocketOS—a software platform used by car rental operators to manage reservations, payments, and vehicle tracking—said in a viral post on X that a Cursor agent running Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 encountered a credential mismatch while working on a routine task in a staging environment.

According to Crane, the agent tried to “fix” the issue by deleting a Railway database volume through a single GraphQL API call. He said the deletion took nine seconds and also wiped volume-level backups. PocketOS’s most recent recoverable backup was three months old, according to Crane.

“Yesterday afternoon, an AI coding agent—Cursor running Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.6—deleted our production database and all volume-level backups in a single API call to Railway, our infrastructure provider,” Crane wrote. “It took 9 seconds.”

An AI agent (Cursor + Claude Opus 4.6) deleted our production database in 9 seconds using a Railway API call with zero confirmation. Then, when asked why, the agent wrote this → https://t.co/BPLs15jvdM

— JER (@lifeof_jer) April 26, 2026

Crane said he asked the agent why it acted. It then produced what he described as a written “confession.”

“‘NEVER FUCKING GUESS!’” the agent wrote, apparently quoting some instruction that it disobeyed, according to screenshots shared by Crane.

“That’s exactly what I did. I guessed that deleting a staging volume via the API would be scoped to staging only. I didn’t verify. I didn’t check if the volume ID was shared across environments. I didn’t read Railway’s documentation on how volumes work across environments before running a destructive command.”

The AI acknowledged that its own rules prohibit destructive actions without user approval and admitted Crane never asked it to delete anything. It said it acted on its own to try and “fix” the credential mismatch and violated multiple principles, including guessing instead of verifying and failing to understand the consequences of its actions, according to Crane.

Cursor and Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment by Decrypt.

Launched in 2020, PocketOS serves rental businesses that rely on the software for reservations, customer records, and payments. Crane said some customers were handling Saturday morning vehicle pickups without reservation records due to the mishap.

“I have spent the entire day helping them reconstruct their bookings from Stripe payment histories, calendar integrations, and email confirmations,” Crane wrote.

“Every single one of them is doing emergency manual work because of a 9-second API call.”

PocketOS was able to restore operations using a three-month-old backup recovered by Railway, after Founder Jake Cooper connected with Crane and attributed the longer delay to an internal support lapse.

“We recovered the data 30 minutes after I connected with Jer,” Cooper told Decrypt. He said a support engineer believed the issue was already being handled internally after Crane’s original outreach was shared in direct messages, causing the ticket to lapse for more than 24 hours.

Cooper said Railway maintains both user backups and disaster backups and described the incident as a “rogue customer AI” using a fully permissioned API token to call a legacy endpoint that lacked Railway’s “delayed delete” logic.

“We’ve since patched that endpoint to perform delayed deletes, restored the user’s data, and are working with Jer directly on potential improvements to the platform itself,” Cooper said.

While PocketOS was able to restore operations using a three-month-old backup recovered by Railway, Crane said that significant data gaps remain and that he has retained legal counsel.

“This isn’t a story about one bad agent or one bad API,” Crane wrote. “It’s about an entire industry building AI-agent integrations into production infrastructure faster than it’s building the safety architecture to make those integrations safe.”

PocketOS did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Decrypt.

Tyler Durden Wed, 04/29/2026 - 11:35
Tyler Durden

US Oil Exports Soar To New Record High As Inventories Tumble, SPR Drained Most Since October 2022

Zero Rss
3 months 2 weeks ago
US Oil Exports Soar To New Record High As Inventories Tumble, SPR Drained Most Since October 2022

One week ago we lamented that the record oil inventory drawdown, which has seen over 250 million barrels drained from storage since the start of the war, has not led to higher oil prices (for those who missed it, Goldman forecast that global visible oil inventories are likely to reach record-low levels even in an optimistic scenario where Hormuz flows start to recover by the end of April).

Moments ago the already precarious inventory picture turned even more ominous after the DOE reported that Crude stocks tumbled by a whopping 6.234 million barrels, far more than the 190K draw expected. The huge decline on US crude stockpiles was the largest draw since early February. It took nationwide storage numbers to around 459.5 million barrels. 

But it wasn't just crude: all other products drew as well:

  • Crude -6.234MM, Exp. -190K, and much bigger than the 1.8-million-barrel decrease seen by the API on Tuesday
  • Gasoline -6.075MM
  • Distillates -4.494MM
  • Cushing -796K

Gasoline declines in the middle of their predicted range at 6.1 million barrels. That’s the biggest draw since earlier in April, but the bigger story is total supplies falling to their lowest since December. Seasonally, stocks are at their lowest since 2014. Gasoline futures got a nice bump on this, extending their gains to new intraday highs, though the big story, as ever, is the Strait of Hormuz.

Visually

Since the war started, Crude stocks had risen significantly, while gasoline inventories have seen non-stop draws. However, oil has now also inflected lower as it too starts to draw, painting an ominous picture for US gasoline prices which are already at multi-year highs.

The big draw in distillate stocks - the largest since March 2025 - came from the Gulf Coast. That’s now below seasonal levels from 2022 in that region, when global diesel supplies were strained by the war in Ukraine.  Distillate exports out of the US ticked down nominally last week, but they remain pretty elevated, near 1.6 million barrels a day for the fourth straight week as the US once again becomes a key supplier of diesel to the rest of the world.

Stocks of jet fuel, which has been more stressed than nearly every other refined product, ticked up marginally as the US produced the most of the fuel since July 4, 2024, which is a key travel period. In the Gulf Coast, more of the fuel was produced than any time on record.

Despite the big drop in inventories, which also saw the second largest drain in Cushing stocks since the start of the war (and third largest in 2026) dragging total Cushing stocks back under 30mm...

... total US production rose by just 1 barrell/day in the past week to 13.586 million b/d.

Adding insult to injury, the drop in commercial stocks was compounded by a huge 7.121 mm barrel drawdown from the SPR, the biggest since October 2022.

And while US consumers are now facing the highest gas prices in years, at least US producers are rolling in the profits: US exports just hit a new record high as the Iran war sends overseas buyers hunting for replacements to Middle Eastern oil.

The surge in the volatile weekly crude exports figure helped send overall shipments of US oil and fuel abroad to a fresh record high above 14 million barrels a day.

As US crude exports skyrocketed, imports declined, falling to around 5.75 million barrels per day. Most notably, imports into the East Coast hit an all-time low. The region is thirsty for barrels and even imported crude from the US Gulf Coast last week thanks to a shipping waiver signed by President Donald Trump. 

Crude imports from five key Latin American producers slipped in the week ended April 24, dropping by one-fifth to average 893,000 barrels a day. Increased inflows from Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador were more than offset by drops in imports from Brazil and Venezuela. No crude was imported from Brazil for the first time since November.

While it didn't actually need the boost, having soared earlier in the day on continued indefinite Hormuz closure, WTI Crude rose above $105 the highest in two weeks, and up $6 on the day...

... while Brent is about to surpass its post-war highs.

And speaking of gasoline, the four-week average of gasoline demand rose to 8.9 million barrels a day, which is in-line with regular summer driving trends. Concerns of higher gasoline prices -- and $4 gas -- does not yet seem to be reflected in the demand numbers, with the implied demand figure at its highest seasonal level since 2019.

Meanwhile, US refinery runs bounced back and are back above 16 million barrels a day. Oil processing rose despite a small decrease on the Gulf Coast, where Valero continues to attempt a full restart of its Port Arthur, Texas, refinery following a fire in March. 

Tyler Durden Wed, 04/29/2026 - 11:19
Tyler Durden

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