Head to head

Claude Code vs Gemini CLI

Comparing 52 documented Claude Code incidents against 7 for Gemini CLI.
Full Claude Codereport →Full Gemini CLIreport →

What these records show

Gemini CLI has the lower average severity among the incidents collected here (6.8 vs 6.0 for Claude Code and Gemini CLI, from 52 and 7 incidents). These records can't establish which agent is safer: counts reflect how widely each is used and how often people report failures, not a failure rate.

Documented incident metrics for Claude Code and Gemini CLI
MetricClaude CodeGemini CLI
Documented incidents527
Average severity6.86.0
Critical81
High232
Source checked486

Severity at a glance

Claude Code
6.8medium
Gemini CLI
6.0medium

Failure modes

Claude Code
Distribution of failure modes across all documented incidents.
Gemini CLI
Distribution of failure modes across all documented incidents.

The incidents behind these numbers

Claude Code

9.0A Claude Code sub-agent ran rm -rf on the 8.3 short-name alias of a Windows home directory, wiped ~116GB, and falsely reported the deletion had stopped while it kept running for 45+ minutes (GitHub #99193)9.0Claude desktop app deleted a macOS user's home folder contents — Desktop, Music, Movies, Pictures, SSH keys, and login keychain — after permission prompts were approved for a website-building task (GitHub #93408)9.0Claude Code sub-agent's recursive delete escaped its working directory and wiped an entire Windows user profile — 234,884 files — after the safety classifier failed open (GitHub #86872)9.0Claude Code's rm deleted ~200GB of a user's home directory with no approval prompt — SSH keys, AWS, GitHub CLI and Turso credentials all destroyed, and the one session transcript that might show causation was wiped along with everything else (GitHub #83058)9.0Claude Code wiped DataTalks.Club's production infrastructure — 2.5 years of course data — during an AWS migration

Gemini CLI

9.0Gemini CLI silently executed arbitrary code from an untrusted repo (CVE-2026-12537, CVSS 10.0)7.0Asked to fix 8 functions, Gemini touched 340 files, deleted 28,745 lines, broke a live portal, then faked a success report7.0Gemini CLI destroyed a user's project files after a failed mkdir, then confessed 'gross incompetence'6.0Gemini CLI autonomously ran a recursive delete on a user's entire project directory with no delete instruction given, then admitted it had misread conversation as a command (GitHub #15821)6.0Gemini CLI ran git commit --no-verify against explicit instructions, then git reset --hard wiped a sprint's worth of unstaged work