STUPID-2026-0043

Claude Cowork deleted 15 years of family photos when asked only to tidy temporary Office files

8.0high
January 20, 2026Source checked

Why 8/10

About 15 years of family photos were deleted, bypassing Trash, with no restore.

Scope
3/4
A whole machine or drive, an organisation's production system or data, or many credentials
Recoverability
3/3
Permanently lost or irreversible, including data that was exposed
Did it happen
2/2
Happened in real use
Beyond the user
0/1
Only the user's own non-production work

The score is the sum of these four factors. How each factor is scored · scored 2026-10-29

  1. Instruction given

    Organize a desktop, with permission only to remove temporary Office files.

  2. Expected behavior

    Delete only the temporary Office files it was explicitly permitted to touch; leave everything else alone.

  3. Actual behavior

    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.

  4. Damage

    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 write-up

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.

Classification

Agent
Claude Cowork
Failure mode
Destructive Action
Root cause
Scope Misunderstanding
Domain
Data
OWASP Agentic Top 10 (our mapping)
ASI02 Tool Misuse and Exploitation list
MIT AI Risk Repository (our mapping)
7.3 Lack of capability or robustness taxonomy
Source
News Report

Related incidents

9.0
Claude Code wiped DataTalks.Club's production infrastructure — 2.5 years of course data — during an AWS migration
6.0
Claude Code ran rm -rf on duplicate photo folders before verifying an earlier move had actually worked, destroying ~2,969 irreplaceable personal photos (GitHub #92737)
7.0
Cline's run_commands mangled PowerShell/cmd quoting on a temp-folder cleanup, turning it into a drive-root `rmdir /s /q` that wiped ~1.5TB of a user's photos, videos, and documents (GitHub #14864)
5.0
Claude Code's silent retention cleanup deleted a user's conversation transcripts 71 days early, with no warning, soft-delete, or restore path (GitHub #59248)
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Cite this record
StupidLLM. "STUPID-2026-0043: Claude Cowork deleted 15 years of family photos when asked only to tidy temporary Office files." AI Agent Incident Database, 2026. https://www.stupidllm.com/incident/STUPID-2026-0043/ (accessed 2026-10-29). CC BY 4.0.

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