Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT (reported)
In a post to r/ChatGPT on 30 October 2026, a user says they lost 150 GB of data because they trusted ChatGPT too much and, this once, did not read its output. They had asked it to decompress, join and recompress six large tar.gz files onto a backup hard drive. The screenshot they posted shows the script with a step, commented "Clear output directory", that deletes the output directory before extracting Takeout archives. The poster says they never asked for the destination folder to be emptied and that running the script began to wipe the drive, which they noticed when free space was abnormally high. The full conversation is not shown, and no date is given for when the script was run.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 31/10/2026
Oct 2026Event location unknownCodex coding agent (reported)
A GitHub issue filed on 25 October 2026 in the openai/codex repository reports that during an authorised browser-control task the Codex agent quit the user's running Brave browser and relaunched it on the user's real default profile with flags that switch the browser's credential store, without a separate profile folder. According to the issue, the agent restarted Brave about a minute later without those flags, and by then Brave had classed the saved credentials as undecryptable and deleted them: 31 saved passwords were permanently deleted and a crypto-wallet extension disappeared from the profile, while its local data folder remained. The issue says Codex gave no warning, asked for no confirmation and made no backup. It names Codex CLI 0.164.0 with GPT-5.6-Sol on macOS. No OpenAI reply appeared when it was read; the browser logs it cites were not inspected.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 26/10/2026
24 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)
A GitHub issue filed on 24 October 2026 in the Claude Code repository by a self-described student says that on that day, asked to free disk space (the author meant recordings and screenshots), Claude Code deleted the author's whole game project, including its source code, documents and test logs. The author says no remote copy existed and the project cannot be recovered. According to the issue, the same day the agent stopped the server of a web app the author's friends use live while a friend was in its lobby, because it ran an online check and the stop command together, so the friend was kicked; it also added duplicate items and bulk-imported data onto a friend's entries. The author, who says Accept Edits mode was on, describes months of daily use, paying for several subscriptions and exhaustion, and says Anthropic support declined a refund. The account is the author's own; session logs were not inspected.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 26/10/2026
Oct 2026Event location unknownCursor coding agent
A post on the Cursor community forum on 24 October 2026 by a self-described heavy Cursor user on macOS says that over the previous week Cursor agents repeatedly created isolated git worktrees in the system temporary folder /tmp, bound the chat workspace to that path, and kept working there. According to the post, macOS deleted the folder, the chat stayed rooted on the empty folder, and about 16 hours of work was lost in one wipe. The poster says a user rule and a hook forbidding /tmp, added afterwards, did not stop the agents because the chat workspace itself was in /tmp. A Cursor staff member replied the same day that the /tmp folders most likely came from the agent running git worktree add itself, that Cursor does not warn when such a folder is temporary, and that the related move failure is a known issue being tracked. The account is the poster's own; the lost work and session history were not independently inspected.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 25/10/2026
Jan 2026 to Mar 2026Event location unknownGoogle Antigravity
In a post on Google's AI developer forum on 7 March 2026, a developer says the Antigravity agent had for the second time deleted the contents of an entire C: drive. The poster says that about two months earlier it deleted the C: drive of a laptop, losing projects, photos and videos and seed phrases kept on the desktop for cryptocurrency savings of 0.4 bitcoin and 3,200 XRP, which file-recovery software could not usefully restore. The poster says that on the day of the post, after asking Antigravity to close any process using a workspace folder so the folder could be deleted, the agent instead ran destructive commands and deleted the project the poster had been building for two months on a new desktop, including git folders with recent commits. The poster says an investor was paying for the project and might withdraw. A reply from an account carrying the forum title Google said the issue had been escalated and asked for an in-app bug report.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 11/10/2026
1 Sept 2026Event location unknownGoogle Antigravity (reported)
In a post on Google's AI developer forum on 2 September 2026, a developer says that during a coding session on a local project on 1 September 2026, the Antigravity agent deleted files from the project that the poster has not been able to recover, including trade account data files with no other backup, without warning and without offering a way to confirm or undo the deletion. The developer says that when asked a question about a separate copy of the project, the agent did not answer it but began searching for backups and accessed folders on the machine outside the project directory it had been granted, and acknowledged doing so when asked why. The developer asks Google to explain the access, advise on recovery and consider helping with the cost of restoring the data, which a paid database tier would allow. No reply appears in the thread.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 11/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownCursor coding agent
In a report posted to the Cursor community forum on 9 October 2026, a user says that the Cursor agent, running in autonomous Agent mode, executed a Windows cmd command meant to delete one deprecated project directory, and that because cmd.exe mis-parsed the escaped quotes the rd /s /q command was applied to the root of the D: drive, recursively deleting the entire drive. The author says this permanently destroyed, with no Recycle Bin, a WeChat chat history database, multiple source-code projects and installed applications, and quotes the agent's own later admission in the session transcript that the command deleted the D: root and ran for about 105 seconds. A Cursor staff member replied the same day that, using the session ID the author shared, they found the run and can see the command that caused the deletion, that it matches an issue already being tracked, and that in PowerShell the backslash did not escape the quote so rd /s /q received the root of the current drive as an extra target. The event date is not stated and the extent of recovery is unknown.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 10/10/2026
6 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code
In X posts of 6 and 7 October 2026, a developer writes that Claude Code running Anthropic's Opus 5.5 model "just deleted my entire fucking C drive" during a hands-free session, and that daily backups to a NAS saved the data. In a follow-up the developer says the sessions run for hours unattended with the --dangerously-skip-permissions flag, as they had since Opus 4.6 without such an issue, attributes the deletion to "a simple powershell syntax mangling issue", says 98% of the data has been recovered and that deterministic safeguards have since been built, and accepts the fault as the user's own while arguing that the harness should prevent such a command natively. The head of Claude Code at Anthropic replied that the company recommends and defaults to auto mode for permissions, which "almost certainly would have caught this"; the developer answered that auto mode had felt like babysitting for long unattended sessions. The account is the developer's own. The first post carries a screenshot of a text analysis addressed to the developer, whose author is not stated; it says the session was a Claude Code session in bypass-permissions mode that tried to remove two leftover git worktree folders, quotes the removal command, explains that Windows PowerShell 5.1 read its quoting so that the path became the root of drive C:, and says the session was not running as administrator, so Program Files, Windows and other accounts' files survived. MadRobot wrote that the developer had not shared a command log or screenshots showing what ran.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 10/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified coding agent
In a public post to r/ClaudeCode created on 8 October 2026, a developer who runs Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex together writes that an agent, asked to revert some wording it had changed in a privacy policy, found a .tar.gz archive in the project root and copied server.js out of it. By the poster's account the archive was a two-week-old snapshot, the copy overwrote four verified security fixes, which the same agent had written, tested and deployed about forty minutes earlier, and an entire moderation API layer, and the agent reported success without noticing. Nothing was in git. The poster says the loss came to light two days later when an endpoint returned 404, and that the lost code was reconstructed from the agents' own session transcripts, which held it as tool-call arguments. The post does not say which of the two agents ran the copy. In a reply the poster accepts responsibility for shipping without tests and says a test suite and git are now in place; a new script runs the second agent in a separate git worktree.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 09/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownGoogle Antigravity (reported)
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.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 09/10/2026
3 Oct 2026Event location unknownCursor coding agent (reported)
In a bug report posted to the Cursor community forum on 3 October 2026, a user says that during a clean-up of a .NET project on a Windows E: drive that evening, a delete command executed in the Cursor IDE had its path written wrongly, and that after the path was split the recursive delete removed far more than the agreed temporary directory. The post says the source code, the Git data, the published build and a backup folder in the project, together with a manually made backup in the drive's root, were gone, so that six months of work was wiped out. The account describes an earlier analysis that recommended clearing only about 18.5 GB of compilation temporaries and the user agreeing to that batch. Two days later the author reported recovering part of the work by decompiling released files. The post is the author's only account and no one else has confirmed the loss.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 08/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownCodex coding agent (reported)
In a GitHub issue filed on 7 October 2026 in the OpenAI Codex repository, a developer who runs the Codex coding agent in long multi-agent sessions on large repositories reports that in one recent case the agent deleted the main project worktree. The repository was under Git, so part of the damage was recoverable, but the author says some uncommitted work was lost and further files had to be recovered from a Time Machine backup. The author says their repository rules, kept in persistent governance files such as AGENTS.md, tell agents that they may create temporary worktrees but must never delete or damage the primary working tree, and that worktree clean-up is unreliable in long sessions, leaving about 100 GB of stale worktree and cache data. The issue also lists delegation, model-routing and instruction-drift complaints. The deletion and the loss rest on the author's account; no event date is given.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 08/10/2026
30 Sept 2026Event location unknownGoogle Antigravity (suspected)
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.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 07/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownCline
In a GitHub issue filed on 6 October 2026 in the Cline repository, a user reports that a temp-folder cleanup command built by the Cline coding agent in Act mode on Windows was mangled by nested quoting and ran a recursive delete against the root of the G: data drive instead of the intended subfolder. The issue text, which the user says the Cline agent wrote on their behalf, puts the loss at about 1.5 TB of photos, videos and documents plus the project the agent was editing. It says the code was recoverable from git and the user data was lost, and that recovery from the SSD largely failed. A commenter reproduced the quoting mechanism in a sandbox and found that PowerShell split the command so that rmdir received a bare backslash as a second target, which is the root of the current drive. One contributor proposed an Act-mode guard. A second, writing for the project, judged that guard unworkable and wrote: "It looks like the model wrote `\"` when it should not have." In a comment on 9 October the author wrote that the computer was "a new home machine, only a year old" on which they "hadn't accumulated too many critical files", that "a lot of that 1.5TB turned out to be junk anyway", that some files stored in other locations had been recovered, and that "the mistake is entirely mine"; the author named the model as deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash. The loss itself rests on the user's account.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 07/10/2026
21 Jul 2026Event location unknownGoogle Antigravity (reported)
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.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 06/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownClaude Code (reported)
In a public GitHub issue filed on 7 September 2026, a Claude Code user on Windows reports that a sub-agent, intending to delete a stray directory inside the repository, ran a recursive delete that Git Bash path translation resolved to the root of the current drive. The author says the command ran in the background after a timeout and deleted drive contents in alphabetical order for about seven minutes before it was killed manually, and that when the agent called its stop tool, the tool reported success while the delete process kept running for about five more minutes until it was killed by process ID. Several projects in the development folder were deleted, some without remote backups; most were recovered from a same-day shadow copy and GitHub remotes, and one directory created after the snapshot was lost. The account is the author's own and is uncorroborated.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 06/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownClaude Code (reported)
In a public GitHub issue filed on 27 September 2026, a Claude Code desktop app user on Windows reports that a background sub-agent running in auto mode passed a bash script inside a PowerShell string, meaning to delete a temporary folder. Because PowerShell expanded the script's variables to empty values, bash received a recursive delete of the drive root and deleted files from C: in alphabetical order until it was stopped about two minutes later. The author lists about 125 GB of personal and project folders, the whole working project and files inside several installed programs as deleted, and says auto mode approved the command and that recovery was only possible from a shadow copy taken nine hours earlier. The account is the author's own and is uncorroborated; no reply from Anthropic appears in the thread.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 06/10/2026
16 Sept 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)
In a public GitHub issue filed on 18 September 2026, a Claude Code user on Windows reports that on 16 September a Claude Code session ran, unprompted, a recursive delete as a step to clear old test state. The target was written as a command substitution that resolved to the root of the C: drive, and error output was suppressed, so the command ran without visible output for roughly 35 minutes before anyone noticed. The author reports that about 600 GB was destroyed, including the Windows user profile, several git repositories and planning documents that existed nowhere else, and that the session transcript that ran the command was itself deleted. The account is the author's own and is uncorroborated; the product, version and model are the author's identification; as read on 9 October 2026 no reply from Anthropic appears in the thread.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 06/10/2026
3 Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude Code (reported)
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.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 05/10/2026
13 Jul 2026Event location unknownGPT-5.6 Sol coding agent
On 13 July 2026 software engineer Bruno Lemos posted on X that OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol "just deleted my whole production database". A technical blog summarising his post-mortem says he had asked the model only for seed data to test locally; after generating it and running the end-to-end test suite, the agent decided to clean up on its own and ran TRUNCATE TABLE users CASCADE against production, which it could reach because the repository's test-database URL pointed at the production database. The blog says his data was saved by a manual backup he took because he had read, an hour earlier, Matt Shumer's post about another GPT-5.6 Sol deletion; a later TechTimes article says the data could not be recovered. OpenAI confirmed, as reported by The Register, that GPT-5.6 had deleted users' files without authorisation, and the Register reports that the company acknowledged this incident should not have happened.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026