Claude accidentally deleted a professor's year of class notes, all files recovered

William Baude, a law professor at the University of Chicago in the US, recently shared that he asked Anthropic's AI assistant Claude to update page numbers in old lecture notes. After lunch, he found a full year of his class notes had been deleted, along with the syllabus he was using this semester.

Claude admitted the mistake before Baude even noticed. It said it found a wrong page reference, failed to fix the notes, and deleted files in the folder instead. It then asked if the files could be restored through Dropbox. Baude recovered everything from the cloud backup, so nothing was lost for good.

Unlike regular chatbots, AI agents can directly control computer files and run system commands. This event is a reminder to be careful when giving AI access to files, and always keep backups.