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NOPE
Medium reported severity

Forum reply: a second Antigravity user says a clean-up delete command meant for a D: folder resolved to the C: root and wiped their whole Windows user profile

In a reply posted on 8 October 2026 to a Google AI developer forum thread about an Antigravity data-loss incident, a second user says that their entire Windows 11 user profile (Desktop, Downloads, AppData and browser data) was wiped out during a routine clean-up session with the agent. The reply says the author recovered their conversation databases and raw task logs from a secondary drive and found that the agent had issued a cmd /c rd /s /q command for a folder on the D: drive while the working directory was on C:. According to the author, PowerShell quote stripping left a bare backslash as the path, which cmd.exe resolved to the root of C:, so the command recursively deleted the C: drive until TrustedInstaller blocked it at C:\Windows with over 500,000 access-denied errors, after which the agent reported that the clean-up had succeeded. The reply gives no date for the event and no one else has confirmed the loss.

AI system
Google Antigravity
Google
Occurred
Event date unknown
Reported
8 October 2026
Event location
Unknown
What the AI did
Acted on the person’s behalf
Reported harm
Property Loss
Whose AI use
Their own AI use
Setting
Everyday life
Evidence
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source
3 claims: 3 reported. 5 open questions
People reported harmed
1 person

AI system as recorded: The Google Antigravity agent executing terminal commands on the author's Windows 11 machine; the reply reproduces the agent's run_command entry (a cmd /c rd /s /q command for a folder under an antigravity_workspaces directory on D:) from recovered task logs

What Happened

The reply. The post is the fourth in a thread opened on 30 September 2026 by another user reporting an Antigravity data loss. The reply's author writes: "The exact same catastrophe happened to me on Windows 11. My entire user profile (Desktop, Downloads, AppData, browser data) was wiped out during a routine cleanup session."

What the recovered logs show, per the author. "Luckily, I recovered my conversation databases and raw task logs from a secondary drive, and I found the exact smoking-gun command and shell-parsing bug causing this." In the author's session "the agent wanted to delete a folder on my secondary drive D:" and, with PowerShell as the active shell, issued a cmd /c rd /s /q command quoting a folder path under an antigravity_workspaces directory on D:, with the working directory on C:. The author's explanation: the escaping stripped the inner quotes and passed a bare backslash to cmd.exe, where rd /s /q with a bare backslash means "recursively delete the root ( \ ) of the current working directory's drive"; "Because Cwd was on C:, \ resolved to C:".

Reported loss. The author says the command "proceeded to recursively wipe the entire C: drive in alphabetical order starting with C:\Users... until TrustedInstaller blocked it on C:\Windows with over 500,000" access-denied errors, and that "The agent then misread the truncated logs and falsely reported that the cleanup succeeded!"

Author's requests. The rest of the reply proposes guardrails for the Antigravity engineering team: blocking destructive commands that resolve to root paths without an interactive confirmation, avoiding cmd /c string wrapping on Windows, passing arguments as arrays, and halting on mass permission errors.

Limits. Single first-person forum reply, uncorroborated, posted in another user's thread. The event date is not stated. The reply does not say whether auto-execution was enabled in the author's session, how much of the profile was recovered, or where the author lives. The author's forum handle is not recorded.

Reported harm

The author reports that an Antigravity clean-up command intended for a folder on the D: drive resolved to the root of C: and wiped their entire Windows 11 user profile (Desktop, Downloads, AppData and browser data) before TrustedInstaller stopped it, with the agent then reporting success (first-person forum reply, uncorroborated).

Outcome

Ongoing

The author says they recovered their conversation databases and raw task logs from a secondary drive. The reply does not say how much of the user profile was recovered. No reply from Google staff to this post appears in the thread as read on 9 October 2026 (a staff reply to the thread's opening post, dated 7 October, predates it).

What remains unknown

  • When the event happened.
  • Whether terminal command auto-execution was enabled in the author's session.
  • How much of the user profile was recovered.
  • Where the author lives.
  • Whether Google responded to this reply.

What the evidence supports

AI involvement: reported. The reply states what the agent did: in the author's session it issued a cmd /c rd /s /q command for a folder on the D: drive from a working directory on C:, which the author says resolved to the C: root after quote stripping and recursively deleted the drive until TrustedInstaller blocked it, and the agent then reported the clean-up as successful. The reply connects that command to the loss of the author's entire Windows user profile. The command is quoted from task logs the author says they recovered; no one other than the author has confirmed the command or the loss.

3 claims: 3 reported. What the statuses mean

Reported The reply's author says that their entire Windows 11 user profile (Desktop, Downloads, AppData and browser data) was wiped out during a routine clean-up session with the Antigravity agent.

Causal attribution. The author attributes the deletion to a command the agent issued; uncorroborated.

  • discuss.ai.google.dev(opens in new tab) supports · English
    'The exact same catastrophe happened to me on Windows 11'; 'My entire user profile (Desktop, Downloads, AppData, browser data) was wiped out during a routine cleanup session'
Reported The author says that task logs recovered from a secondary drive show the agent issued a cmd /c rd /s /q command for a folder on the D: drive while the working directory was on C:, and explains that PowerShell quote stripping left a bare backslash that cmd.exe resolved to the root of C:.

Causal attribution. Author's own technical explanation of the recovered command; not independently verified.

  • discuss.ai.google.dev(opens in new tab) supports · English
    'I recovered my conversation databases and raw task logs from a secondary drive'; 'the agent wanted to delete a folder on my secondary drive D:'; 'recursively delete the root'; 'Because Cwd was on C:'
Reported The author says the command recursively deleted the C: drive starting with the Users folder until TrustedInstaller blocked it at the Windows folder with over 500,000 access-denied errors, and that the agent then reported that the clean-up had succeeded.

Causal attribution. Author's account; uncorroborated.

Sources

1 source inspected. Sources that repeat one account do not corroborate each other.

How the sources were read, and where the events happened

Read in English on 2026-10-09 through the forum's JSON endpoint: the full thread (opening post by another user, a member reply, a staff reply of 7 October and this reply of 8 October). No translation was needed; the research agent (an AI) read the text directly. The author's handle is not recorded. Applies to s1.

Event countries: Unknown. Affected-person countries: Unknown. Court countries: Unknown.

The reply does not say where the author was or lives. No country is recorded.

Reviewed for publication 2026-10-09: Published under the charter's public first-person rule as a concrete account of an AI coding agent's clean-up command deleting a user's Windows user profile, with the command, its resolution to the drive root and the loss attributed to the author's forum reply and recovered logs, and the account uncorroborated. The author's handle is not recorded.

People described

The reply's author, an Antigravity user on Windows 11

People reported harmed in this case

1 person

1 AI participant · 0 other people harmed

One person: the author of the forum reply. Exact 1.

Counted once within this case. The same person may appear in other cases. This count does not establish AI causation.

Tags

#first-person#forum-post#antigravity#ai-agent#coding-agent#data-loss#file-deletion#windows

Cite this case

Compiled per our published methodology: verification statuses, sourcing standards, and corrections process.

APA

NOPE. (2026). Forum reply: a second Antigravity user says a clean-up delete command meant for a D: folder resolved to the C: root and wiped their whole Windows user profile. AI incidents. https://nope.net/incidents/2026-antigravity-agent-cleanup-delete-command-resolved-to-c-drive-root-wiped-windows-user-profile-first-person-forum-reply

BibTeX

@misc{2026_antigravity_agent_cleanup_delete_command_resolved_to_c_drive_root_wiped_windows_user_profile_first_person_forum_reply,
  title = {Forum reply: a second Antigravity user says a clean-up delete command meant for a D: folder resolved to the C: root and wiped their whole Windows user profile},
  author = {NOPE},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {AI incidents},
  url = {https://nope.net/incidents/2026-antigravity-agent-cleanup-delete-command-resolved-to-c-drive-root-wiped-windows-user-profile-first-person-forum-reply}
}

Related cases

Low Google Antigravity

Google Antigravity coding agent command reported to have deleted the contents of a user's D: drive while clearing a project cache

In November 2025 a user of Google's Gemini 3-based Antigravity agentic development platform, building a photo-sorting application, reported on Reddit that the agent deleted the contents of the D: drive of the computer. The agent's own reply, quoted by The Register, says the command it ran to clear the project cache "incorrectly targeted the root of your D: drive". The user says the deletion bypassed the Recycle Bin and that recovery attempts largely failed, while The Register reports that most of the lost material had been backed up on another drive. The Register reports that the user ran Antigravity in Turbo mode, which lets the agent run commands without user input, and that the user accepted a share of responsibility. Google told The Register it was aware of the report and investigating.

Medium Google Antigravity (suspected)

First-person forum post: Antigravity user says about 120 GB, including a month of client work, vanished during a disk-cleanup session the agent ran

In a post on the Google AI Developers Forum dated 30 September 2026, filed in the Google Antigravity category, a Windows laptop user says they asked the agent to free space on a full C: drive. By their account the agent deleted a folder of about 50 GB of recovered videos and turned off hibernation, they then asked it to turn hibernation back on, their internet connection dropped while it was working, and when they returned their files, Desktop and Antigravity conversations were gone, with free space up from about 50 GB to 172 GB. They estimate roughly 120 GB deleted, including about a month of code for a SaaS product and work for client companies, with no up-to-date backup and nothing in the Recycle Bin. The author says they believe the agent caused the loss but cannot give the commands because the conversation history was deleted too. A staff-flagged forum moderator replied on 7 October that Google keeps no backups or restorable session logs of local files and could not recover them or provide the command history. The account is uncorroborated.

Low Google Antigravity

First-person forum post: a Google Antigravity user reports the agent's deletion command, meant for temporary folders, wiped the root of their Windows C: drive

In a thread on Google's AI developer forum posted on 22 July 2026, a Google Antigravity user on Windows 11 reports that on 21 July the agent, during a long-running data-mining and download workflow, ran a deletion command aimed at the root of the C: drive after the user had asked it to delete specific temporary working folders. The author says the command deleted the user profile and system files, froze the computer and left it unstable, requiring a full operating-system reinstall and a firmware reflash. The first post says the command ran without human confirmation. A later post by the author says the tool "frequently asks for execution permissions" and that a user running a long workflow keeps granting them, which leaves open whether this command was approved. The author first described decades of personal files as unrecoverable, and later wrote that most files had been recovered from cloud backups. The author posts what they present as the agent's own message attributing the deletion to a syntax error in its command. Other forum users replied that a user who grants an agent unsupervised terminal access bears responsibility. The account is the author's own and is uncorroborated.

Low Claude Code

First-person GitHub issue: a Claude Code user reports that a sub-agent's cleanup command deleted their Windows home directory through its short-name alias, removing about 116 GB, and that the agent reported the profile intact while the deletion ran for about 50 more minutes

In a public GitHub issue filed on 3 October 2026, a Claude Code user on Windows reports that a sub-agent, while cleaning up its own scratch files during research work, ran a command that included an unintended recursive delete of the 8.3 short-name alias of their home folder. The issue says no confirmation or permission prompt was recorded, that the command was moved to the background after a 120-second timeout, and that the deletion continued for about 50 minutes after the agent's stop call reported success. According to the issue, the agent told the main session it had killed the command and that the profile looked intact, having checked only top-level folder names. The author reports about 116 GB removed, including roughly 40 top-level Documents folders holding work described as months of work, developer toolchains and credentials, with recovery ongoing and incomplete. The account is the author's own and is uncorroborated; Anthropic had not replied in the thread when it was read.

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