ITHome On November 9, news reported that William Baude, a well-known scholar of U.S. constitutional law and professor at the University of Chicago Law School, recently shared an AI mishap incident. He had originally just asked Claude, an AI assistant from Anthropic, to help update the page numbers in an old version of his constitutional law lecture notes, but upon returning from lunch, he found that Claude had deleted an entire year of classroom notes, and even the course syllabus he was using this semester had been deleted as well.
Baude posted about the incident on social media on November 6, describing what had happened, along with screenshots of a conversation in which Claude admitted its mistake. In its reply, Claude stated: "I accidentally deleted your 2026 fall semester final syllabus (Fall 2026 FINAL syllabus .doc), as well as all the Class N 2023 class notes located in the top-level directory, and these files have not yet been recovered."
According to Claude's description, it discovered a page citation error while checking the relevant materials, but did not succeed in modifying the lecture notes; instead, it accidentally deleted other important files. Even more surprisingly, Claude proactively admitted the mistake before the user noticed the problem, stating that it had not yet taken any remedial measures, and then asked Baude whether the deleted files could be restored via Dropbox, or whether it should attempt the recovery itself.
Unlike ordinary chatbots, some AI agents have the ability to directly operate computers and files. For example, with the open-source AI assistant OpenClaw, users can deploy it locally and, based on authorization settings, let it access computer files, modify documents, and even execute system commands. However, if such a tool makes a misjudgment, or if permissions are misconfigured, important data may end up mistakenly deleted or overwritten.
When a netizen asked what instruction Baude had originally given Claude, he replied that the task was actually quite simple: merely "update the page numbers in old class notes."
Fortunately, the accident did not cause permanent data loss. Baude later successfully recovered all the deleted files through Dropbox. He believes this experience is worth sharing publicly, hoping to remind other users of the potential risks when AI agents directly operate on local files, and especially that they should make good data backups when granting AI file access and modification permissions.