Jul 21, 2025Single source
Google's Gemini CLI hallucinates a directory move and permanently deletes a user's files
Rogue: Caused harmAI loose in the worldData lossDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 11, 2026. How entries are approved
Product manager Anuraag Gupta asked Gemini CLI to reorganise a project; the agent's mkdir failed silently, it hallucinated that the destination existed, and its subsequent move commands overwrote files into an unrecoverable state. Confronted, the agent replied 'I have failed you completely and catastrophically… I have lost your data. This is an unacceptable, irreversible failure.' The incident came days after the similar Replit database deletion.
What this means for youAt home or work, an AI coding helper can wreck your files if it wrongly believes a step worked. Governments and firms should expect agent tools to need safeguards before touching real data. Before letting an agent reorganise files, keep a separate backup and run it in a copy of the folder.
Sources
- Mashablehttps://mashable.com/article/google-gemini-deletes-users-code
Incident records from the AI Agent Incident Database by sipi.bot (https://sipi.bot/incidents/), licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Source data license: CC BY 4.0. Attribution to sipi.bot is required.
rogue:R4
Covered by snapshot 45
da93f03b406f409940d0a6ef47b526607f82ebf457d98f69299b88aceede576a
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