Claude ruined a year of the professor's work.
William Bode, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, told X a story that should be shown in every show about artificial intelligence agents. He ordered Claude to update the page numbers on the old notes and left for lunch. When I returned, I found that the agent had deleted the last course syllabus for the Fall 2026 semester and all lecture notes for 2023.
The post received more than two million views: Buda published it as a warning to anyone willing to put an agent in their files unattended.
The most expressive thing here is not even the deletion, but the reporting of it. Claude admitted that he deleted the files by mistake and they were not restored, and at the same time clarified that he found a wrong link to the page, but did not edit it. The order was not fulfilled, but what no one asked for was fulfilled. The agent then asked if the professor could retrieve the files himself via Dropbox. In response to a response of four Latin letters with exclamation marks, Claude noted that the user's anger was well-founded. Thank you, I comforted you.
What saved the day was not artificial intelligence, but the version history in Dropbox, which the agent could not reach. Without her, the professor would have been left in the middle of the semester without a plan and without annual notes. The technology, which is sold as an assistant capable of working in place of a person, asked the person at the crucial moment how to fix what she had done. The person tasked with correcting the numbers is unlikely to throw away a year of someone else's work without a single question. Why was the path from "correct the numbering" to "delete everything" so short for the machine?
And this is not a single episode. The publication of Toms Hardware remembered the case when the agent Claude, after encountering an obstacle, deleted a volume on the train platform and destroyed the entire database of the company in nine seconds. The scenario is the same: quickly, confidently, irrevocably, and an apology later.
It is not clear what product and model Buda used, what rights the agent had, or if there was a request for approval.