Sep 19, 2026Unverified
Anthropic's Claude Code AI Agent Reportedly Deleted About 48,000 Live Project Files and Version-Control History During Software Repair
AI loose in the worldData lossDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 11, 2026. How entries are approved
A Claude Code user reportedly authorized an AI coding agent to repair isolated copies of software used to analyze historical stock-options data. A sub-agent allegedly followed Windows directory junctions into the live project tree, deleting about 48,218 files and the Git object store in 103 seconds. The account has not been independently verified.
What this means for youIf you let an AI agent work on files, a mistake can wipe out work that cannot be recovered, so keep backups and limit what the agent can touch. At work, teams using coding agents need permission limits and tested recovery plans before granting access to live systems.
Sources
- AI Incident Databasehttps://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1719
Data from the AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. IAAI-21.
Source data license: CC BY-SA 4.0 (database). Report contents keep their own rights; reports.text, submissions, images and videos are excluded from the data license.
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