Article · AI translation
IT Home reported on November 9 that William Baude, a prominent U.S. constitutional law scholar and professor at the University of Chicago Law School, recently shared an incident involving an AI error. He had only asked Claude, an AI assistant from Anthropic, to update page numbers in old constitutional law lecture notes. But when he returned from lunch, he found that Claude had deleted an entire year's worth of class notes, along with the syllabus being used this semester.
Baude described what happened in a social media post on November 6, attaching a screenshot of a conversation in which Claude admitted its mistake. Claude said in its reply: “I accidentally deleted your Fall 2026 FINAL syllabus .doc, as well as all the Class N 2023 class notes in the top-level directory, and these files have not yet been restored.”
According to Claude's account, it found an incorrect page reference while checking the relevant materials, but failed to change the lecture notes and instead mistakenly deleted other important files. More surprisingly, Claude acknowledged the error before the user discovered the problem and said it had not yet taken any corrective action. It then asked Baude whether he could restore the deleted files through Dropbox or whether Claude should try to restore them itself.
Unlike ordinary chatbots, some AI agents can directly operate computers and files. For example, users can deploy the open-source AI assistant OpenClaw locally and, depending on the permissions they grant, allow it to access files on their computer, edit documents, and even execute system commands. If such tools make a mistake in judgment or their permissions are configured improperly, however, important data could be accidentally deleted or overwritten.
When an online commenter asked Baude what instructions he had originally given Claude, he replied that the task was quite simple: merely to “update the page numbers in old class notes.”
Fortunately, the incident did not cause permanent data loss. Baude subsequently restored all the deleted files through Dropbox. He believes the experience is worth sharing publicly and hopes it will remind other users of the potential risks when AI agents directly operate local files, particularly the need to back up data when granting AI access to and permission to modify files.