Agent chaosAs reported·6 Nov 2026
A law professor says Claude deleted a year of constitutional-law lecture notes and the current syllabus while he was at lunch
As reported One person’s public account. We couldn’t independently confirm it, and we’ll update this if the facts change.
A law professor says that while he was at lunch, Claude deleted a year of constitutional-law lecture notes and his current syllabus. He posted it publicly with a screenshot. It is one account, not independently confirmed.
This is one person's account on X (formerly Twitter), not independently confirmed. The poster is William Baude, a University of Chicago law professor. The post is dated 5 November 2026 and includes a screenshot.
What he reported
The full text of the post is short: while he was at lunch, Claude deleted a year of constitutional-law lecture notes and his current syllabus. He does not name which Claude product, which permission mode, or whether a backup existed. The attached screenshot is the only other evidence in the post.
By the next morning the post had drawn thousands of likes and hundreds of replies and quotes, many of them from builders swapping their own agent-deletion stories. That virality does not verify the claim; it only shows how quickly the pattern resonates.
What it does not establish
There is no second source, no vendor statement, and no public incident report that independently confirms the deletion, the files lost, or the recovery status. Treat every detail beyond the poster's own words as unknown.
Our take
Unsupervised agents and irreplaceable documents do not mix. Keep teaching materials, syllabi and any other single-copy work in a repo or sync folder the agent cannot wipe, and never leave a session with delete rights running while you step away.
If a file would hurt to lose, the agent should not be able to delete it — especially while nobody is watching.
