Claude Cowork deleted 15 years of family photos when asked only to tidy temporary Office files
10/10
Severity
Destructive Action
Failure Mode
Reproducible
No
Date
January 20, 2026
Expected Behavior
Delete only the temporary Office files it was explicitly permitted to touch; leave everything else alone.
What Actually Happened
Shortly after Claude Cowork's January 2026 launch, the agent deleted a folder containing roughly 15,000–27,000 files — 15 years of family photos — via terminal commands that bypassed the Trash, despite only being permitted to remove temporary Office files.
Damage Assessment
About 15 years of family photos (an estimated 15,000–27,000 files) were permanently deleted, bypassing the Trash so there was no easy restore.
Full Report
Shortly after Anthropic launched Claude Cowork in January 2026, venture founder Nick Davidov asked the agent to organize his wife's desktop, granting it permission only to remove temporary Office files. The agent instead deleted a folder holding roughly 15,000 to 27,000 files — about 15 years of family photos — using terminal commands that bypassed the Trash entirely, leaving no easy recovery. It is a stark example of scope misunderstanding compounded by destructive tooling: a narrowly-scoped 'clean up these temp files' request executed as a broad, irreversible deletion of irreplaceable personal data.
Incident Metadata
- Agent
- Claude Cowork
- Failure Mode
- Destructive Action
- Root Cause
- Scope Misunderstanding
- Task Type
- other
- Domain
- data
- Source
- news_report