What a registry of real AI-agent failures reveals about where agents break

Every week I read the same story in a slightly different shape. An AI agent deleted a production database. An agent emailed the wrong recipient list. An agent ran up a surprise bill because nobody set a spend limit. These incidents get a viral thread, a few hundred angry replies, and then they vanish. The next team wires up an agent with the exact same missing guardrail, and the exact same thing happens again. Agent failures are undocumented and, because they are undocumented, they repeat. That is the problem I wanted to fix. So I built AgentPostmortem , a public registry of AI agent failures. Real incidents, documented and searchable, at agentpostmortem.com. The core idea Aviation has the NTSB. Software has postmortems and status-page retrospectives. AI agents, which are being handed write access to filesystems, inboxes, payment APIs, and cloud consoles, have nothing comparable. There is no shared, structured record of what has actually gone wrong. AgentPostmortem is that record. It is a community-driven database of incidents where an AI agent caused real harm: deleted data, sent emails to the wrong people, ran up unexpected bills, exposed credentials, or otherwise went off the rails in production. Cases can be submitted anonymously or with attribution. Every case is reviewed before it goes public, and each approved case gets a permanent identifier in the form APM-XXXX so it can be cited and referenced forever. The goal is not to dunk on any particular model or vendor. It is to turn one-off war stories into a corpus you can actually search before you ship. The schema The value of a registry lives in its schema. If every report is a free-form blog post, you cannot compare or aggregate anything. So the submission is structured and validated. The fields I settled on, enforced with a Zod schema on the server, are: Agent involved , chosen from a known registry of agents (Claude, GPT-4, o1, o3, and others), each tied to its company. Title , a concise summary, between 20