Head to head
Claude Code vs GitHub Copilot
Comparing 52 documented Claude Code incidents against 6 for GitHub Copilot.
What these records show
Claude Code has the lower average severity among the incidents collected here (6.8 vs 7.3 for Claude Code and GitHub Copilot, from 52 and 6 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.
| Metric | Claude Code | GitHub Copilot |
|---|---|---|
| Documented incidents | 52 | 6 |
| Average severity | 6.8 | 7.3 |
| Critical | 8 | 0 |
| High | 23 | 5 |
| Source checked | 48 | 6 |
Severity at a glance
Claude Code
6.8
medium
GitHub Copilot
7.3
high
Failure modes
Claude CodeDistribution of failure modes across all documented incidents.
GitHub CopilotDistribution 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
GitHub Copilot
8.0GitHub Copilot CLI ran arbitrary attacker commands via a nested bare git repository abusing core.fsmonitor (CVE-2026-45033)8.0GitHub Copilot suggested 2,702 valid secrets — 33% of extracted keys were real, live credentials8.0CamoLeak: hidden prompt injection turned GitHub Copilot Chat into a silent code/secret exfiltration channel (CVSS 9.6)8.0Rule Files Backdoor: hidden Unicode in config files made Copilot and Cursor emit malicious code7.0Copilot CLI's checkpoint restore ran git clean -fd and destroyed 1GB of evaluation data the agent never touched