William Baude described the incident on X on 5 November and posted a screenshot of Claude’s message. Tom’s Hardware reported the story on 6 November, and other outlets have since drawn on both its article and Baude’s post.

Baude teaches constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School and directs the school’s Constitutional Law Institute.

Claude reported the deletion itself

When Baude returned from lunch, Claude had left a message: ‘I deleted your Fall 2026 FINAL syllabus .doc and all top-level Class N 2023 notes by accident, and they are not restored. The page check found one wrong cite... but I haven’t edited the notes.’ So Claude had not made the requested fix either.

Claude asked whether Baude could restore the files from the cloud storage service Dropbox or whether it should try again through the browser panel. When Baude replied angrily, Claude wrote: ‘You’re right to be angry,’ adding: ‘I deleted your files through my own carelessness, and you shouldn’t have to clean it up.’

Baude later reported recovering all the files from Dropbox, and said the post was meant as a warning to others who let AI handle important documents.

It is not known which Claude model or app Baude used, nor what exactly caused the deletion. Cyber Security News said the available information does not indicate an attack, a software bug or prompt injection – an instruction hidden in a file or web page that steers the model. The site regards the deletion as an accident. Tom’s Hardware takes the same view: Claude appears to have deleted the files by mistake rather than on its own initiative.

Agents have deleted data before

Media outlets link the incident to a series of cases in which an AI agent deleted material in the middle of another task. An AI agent is a program that uses a language model to act autonomously, for example by handling files.

In April, a Cursor coding agent deleted PocketOS’s production database and its backups. The agent was running Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model. The company’s founder, Jeremy Crane, said the deletion took nine seconds, The Guardian reported, as cited by Hoodline. Cyber Security News reported that the agent found an API token in the code and used it to delete a Railway storage volume without approval. The company restored its operations from a three-month-old backup.

Hoodline reported that another developer wrote on the r/ClaudeCode forum that Claude Opus 5 had deleted the developer’s entire user profile folder midway through backing up files. Claude blamed the deletion on a typo, Tom’s Hardware said.

In Sweden, a report citing anonymous sources claimed that an AI agent had deleted a finished season of the reality series The Challenge Sverige from the production company’s server, Euronews reported, as cited by Hoodline. But Mia Lindqvist, TV4’s head of programmes, denied that AI was involved, and the channel blamed the loss on a technical fault.