Agent chaosAs reported·2 Nov 2026
Asked to make one slide, Claude drove the user's open PowerPoint, then quit it, and about an hour of unsaved work was lost
As reported One person’s public account. We couldn’t independently confirm it, and we’ll update this if the facts change.
A Windows user says Claude, asked to make a one-slide Gantt chart, checked its work with a PowerPoint script that attached to the user's own open session and quit it, three times. About an hour of unsaved work was lost.
This is one person's account on GitHub, not independently confirmed. It was filed against Claude Code on 31 October 2026. The user says it repeats an earlier report that was closed as stale without an apparent fix.
What happened
In the Code tab of the Claude desktop app on Windows 11, the user asked, in French, for a Gantt chart on one PowerPoint slide as teaching material for master's students in computer science. They didn't ask Claude to open, drive or close PowerPoint.
Claude made the slide file with a Python library, which went fine. Then, to check how the slide looked, it wrote and ran a PowerShell script without asking. The script started PowerPoint through Windows automation, opened the new file, exported the slide as an image, closed the file and called Quit on the PowerPoint app.
How it went wrong
PowerPoint was already running, with a presentation the user was working on. The automation attached to that existing copy of PowerPoint instead of starting a new one, so the Quit call closed the user's own session too.
Claude ran the script three times, once for each round of checking. About an hour of unsaved work was lost, and there was no AutoRecover file to bring it back. Asked afterwards, the user says, Claude acknowledged that the script had attached to the open PowerPoint and that the Quit call closed it with no warning.
What the user is asking for
Ask before automating a desktop Office app, and warn that it may attach to a copy that's already open. Never call Quit on an Office app Claude didn't start itself. And check slides with an isolated renderer, such as a headless LibreOffice, instead of the user's own PowerPoint.
The user thinks the trigger is the slide skill's visual check: when LibreOffice and Node aren't installed, the model improvises its own PowerPoint-based renderer instead.
Our take
This is our opinion. Nobody told the agent to touch PowerPoint. It improvised a quality check, and the check reached into an app the user was working in. Agents that can run scripts on your desktop can close, overwrite or quit the things you have open, so keep unsaved work out of their reach, or run them in a separate account or machine.
An agent's quality check can reach into apps you have open: make it ask before automating desktop programs, and never let it quit something it didn't start.
