# Railway admits employee hacked competitor after AI model jumped the rails

> Source: <https://www.thestack.technology/railway-admits-employee-hacked-competitor-after-ai-model-jumped-the-rails/>
> Published: 2026-11-04 08:32:59+00:00

Just weeks after admitting it had been hacked, development platform Railway acknowledged Tuesday that one of its own employees used an AI agent to worm its way into a rival’s servers.

On Monday, Josh Manders, founder of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) developer tools platform Primcloud, reported that a Railway employee had been trying to inveigle themselves into his company’s databases.

"They pulled credentials from inside their app's container and used them to request every secret on the platform: ours and every other customer's," he [said](https://x.com/joshmanders/status/2117530391183507484?ref=thestack.technology). 

"They tried our cloud provider's metadata endpoint, the standard way to steal credentials for the host a container runs on. They asked the cluster what those stolen credentials were allowed to do. They went looking for our databases and caches by guessing their internal names. They port-scanned our whole internal network, all 65,536 addresses, twice. It was about 24 commands over 15 minutes, done on purpose and scripted. No app was ever run. Every attempt was blocked. Nothing was accessed."

Manders identified the employee as Jake Runzer, a senior product engineer who has been with Railway for over six years. The Primcloud founder said that Runzer had used a fake ID, but also used a personal credit card for the account and linked to his own GitHub repository. Runzer confessed to the incident shortly afterwards.

"Ah yup. That was indeed me," [Runzer admitted](https://x.com/jakerunzer/status/2117474337682780643?ref=thestack.technology). 

"No mallace (sic) intended. I've been running some agents to do signups + agentic testing on similar platforms. Just halted the harness I was designing around this as it was definitely going off the rails and reaching too far."

While Runzer’s mea culpa appears honest, it could also land him in a whole heap of trouble.

This kind of hacking is a serious crime in the US, UK, and other countries, not to mention the possibility of civil litigation against Railway. However, Railway founder Jake Cooper seemed to be taking a more relaxed view of the situation, saying only that it had taken "appropriate action" against the employee.

We have asked Railway for more details and while it acknowledged the request, no further details have been forthcoming. We’ll update the story if more information becomes available.