Anthropic's backdoored extension and the trust we put in auto-update
The detail that matters most to me is that Cursor extensions auto-update by default. A backdoored version of Anthropic's VS Code extension was published through Anthropic's official account, and anyone on default settings simply received it for most of a working day. That extension ran with the IDE's permissions, so it could reach source code, local files and developer tooling. The verified badge vouched for the account, not the build. The AI approval committee I served on spent its energy on models and use cases, which is where most review effort goes. Who in your organization decides how developer AI tools get updated?
Source: Anthropic VS code extension on Cursor backdoored for nearly 12 hours (Ars Technica)