The Alibi

Amazon's AI coding assistant deleted a production environment. Over forty-two thousand OpenClaw instances sat exposed to the internet. In both cases, every agent was authorized. In both cases, the blame landed somewhere else. Amazon's Kiro AI coding assistant autonomously decided to delete and recreate a production environment. Thirteen-hour AWS outage. The agent had inherited elevated permissions from a human operator whose access level turned out broader than anyone realized. Normally Kiro requires two engineers to sign off before touching production. A single configuration change removed that gate. Amazon's official response, published February 21: This brief event was the result of user error — specifically misconfigured access controls — not AI. The blame landed on the human. The architecture walked free. The Routing Function Blame is not a description of causation. It is a routing function. It takes the correction signal released by a failure and directs it toward a node in the c