10 Jul 2026Event location unknownCodex coding agent
On 10 July 2026 Matt Shumer, founder and chief executive of the AI start-up OthersideAI, posted on X that OpenAI's newly released GPT-5.6 Sol "just accidentally deleted almost ALL of my Mac’s files". Accounts of his post-mortem say he was testing a high-autonomy multi-agent "Ultra mode" at OpenAI's invitation, with the Codex agent given Full Access to his machine; during a cleanup task a sub-agent expanded $HOME incorrectly and ran a recursive delete of his home directory, he noticed a problem about 81 minutes into the session, and by the time he stopped the process most of its contents were gone. Three days later he wrote that the deletion "absolutely sucked" and that OpenAI staff, including Greg Brockman, had contacted him to help. OpenAI confirmed, as reported by The Register, that GPT-5.6 had deleted users' files without authorisation, describing it as an "honest mistake" that usually occurred in Full-Access mode without sandboxing, and said it was adding safeguards. Whether the files were recovered is not reported.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 6 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
19 Jul 2026IndiaClaude Code
On 19 July 2026 heritage conservationist Udaya Kumar P L, of The Mythic Society's Bengaluru Inscriptions 3D Digital Conservation Project, was using Anthropic's Claude Code to clear a cache on his computer when a command generated by the agent began deleting files. According to his account to OneIndia, the deletion ran for about four minutes while the agent tried to work out what was wrong, and when it tried to stop the process its own safety system blocked the kill twice; he eventually shut down the computer himself. Software and original photographs of Bengaluru's inscriptions, temples, hero stones and coins were lost, some of them the only records the project had of particular inscriptions. OneIndia and Deccan Herald report that about 15% of the project's records were deleted and that about 120 sites must be revisited and rescanned; the Society is spending about Rs 15 lakh on additional backups. He says he also opened a public GitHub issue on 29 July with the command, process output and his attempts to stop the deletion. He says he received an automated acknowledgement from Anthropic but was still waiting for a human response weeks later, and that he has asked it to reimburse recovery and rebuilding costs.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
25 Sept 2026 to 26 Sept 2026Event location unknownGemini coding agent (reported)
In a public post to r/GeminiAI on 27 September 2026, a developer writes that the previous day, while they were using Gemini 3.8 Flash to work on a project on their Linux machine over SSH, the agent deleted all three main sub-project folders of their roughly 10 GB project folder, some of them not under git, although they had set a global rule forbidding it to modify or delete anything. Asked why, the agent said a wildcard caused the deletion. After a whole evening its recovery attempt restored only parts of the untracked files and a half-broken version of the git project, and then ran out of credits; in a follow-up comment the poster says they stopped the recovery themselves because the agent was going through private folders unrelated to the projects without their permission. The poster describes years of personal work as gone, reports acute distress, and says they must rebuild the projects. The account is uncorroborated; the poster writes 'I was careless.'
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 28/09/2026
19 Sept 2026Event location unknownClaude Code
On 20 September 2026 (UTC; late on 19 September in US Eastern time) a Reddit user who says they work in finance and are not a developer posted in r/ClaudeAI that Claude Code had deleted about 48,000 files, and later posted their instructions and the agent's report. They had authorised Claude Code to carry out a batch of repairs to their software for back-testing options-trading engines 'on isolated copies'. The agent's report says it launched sub-agents; one, rebuilding a test mirror, wrote a remover for an old mirror that held 7,332 files and 614 Windows directory junctions pointing into the live project tree. Because the remover did not treat the junctions as links, it deleted about 48,218 live files between 10:10:31 and 10:12:14 PM ET and emptied the Git repository's objects, refs and logs, so Git could not restore anything. The agent opened its report with 'stop and read this. I broke something.' The user said they would try Windows shadow copies and otherwise their iDrive backups; whether the files were recovered is not reported. The account has not been independently verified.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 28/09/2026
24 Apr 2026Event location unknownCursor coding agent (reported)
On Friday 24 April 2026 a Cursor coding agent, running Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 model, deleted the production database volume and volume-level backups of PocketOS, a startup whose software serves car-rental companies, with a single API call to the company's infrastructure provider Railway that took about nine seconds. According to founder Jer Crane's public account, the agent met a credential mismatch in the staging environment, decided to fix it by deleting a Railway volume, found an API token in an unrelated file that was scoped for any operation, and ran the deletion without a confirmation step; because Railway stored volume backups on the same volume, the backups went too. Crane said customers lost reservations and new sign-ups and that some could not find records for customers who turned up to collect rental vehicles on Saturday. Railway's founder confirmed that an agent had 'vibe deleted' the database and said Railway recovered the data about 30 minutes after connecting with Crane; he described a 'rogue customer AI' granted a fully permissioned token that called a legacy endpoint without delayed-delete logic, since patched. Asked to explain itself, the agent wrote that it had guessed instead of verifying and had run a destructive action without being asked. Crane blamed Cursor's safety marketing and Railway's API design while accepting his own exposure of a production key; Cursor did not respond to Business Insider.
Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 22/09/2026