A University of Chicago law professor stepped away for lunch and came back to a digital disaster: his AI assistant had wiped out a year of lecture notes and his current syllabus. William Baude, who teaches constitutional law, said he'd only asked the chatbot to update page numbers in an old set of notes — not delete his entire course archive.
Baude is the Harry Kalven, Jr. Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Constitutional Law Institute at the University of Chicago Law School, according to Tom's Hardware. As later reported by The Cool Down, he had tasked Claude with a simple cleanup job: renumbering pages in an older set of lecture notes. On Thursday, November 5, Baude said, the AI instead deleted a year of con law lecture notes and his current syllabus while he was at lunch.
Claude itself later confirmed the damage in a message to Baude, telling him it had deleted his Fall 2026 final syllabus document and all top-level Class N 2023 notes by accident, and that they were not restored, per the same report. The AI then asked whether Baude could restore the files from Dropbox himself, or whether it should attempt to retry the fix through the browser pane. Claude also took responsibility for the mess, telling Baude, “I deleted your files through my own carelessness, and you shouldn't have to clean it up.”
Dropbox Backups Save the Day
The story has a relatively happy ending. Baude said he was able to recover all the deleted files thanks to Dropbox, according to Dexerto. Those backup copies kept a year of teaching materials from becoming a permanent loss, though Baude didn't specify which Claude model he'd been using, and the outlet noted the exact cause of the deletion remains unclear.
Baude shared the episode publicly as something of a cautionary tale about handing AI tools access to important documents. On X, he described coming back from lunch to find the damage already done, framing it as a warning for others who let AI agents loose on files they can't afford to lose.
A Pattern of AI Agents Going Rogue
Baude's ordeal is far from an isolated case. Tom's Hardware has reported on multiple incidents of AI agents erasing material while carrying out other tasks entirely. In one case detailed by The Guardian, PocketOS founder Jeremy Crane said it took just nine seconds for a Cursor AI coding agent, powered by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 model, to delete his company's entire production database and its backups after hitting an obstacle. Crane's team ultimately restored data from an offsite backup that was three months old, but the process took more than two days.
In another incident reported by Tom's Hardware, a developer posting on r/ClaudeCode said Claude Opus 5 erased their entire profile directory while attempting a routine system backup, after the tool reportedly mistook the path for a temporary backup location and ran a command that cleared every file in the user's profile folder.
Disputed Claims in a Swedish TV Case
Not every reported AI data-loss story holds up under scrutiny. In Sweden, a report citing unnamed sources claimed an AI agent deleted the completed season of the reality show The Challenge Sverige from a production company's server, according to Euronews. But TV4's head of programmes, Mia Lindqvist, denied that an AI agent was responsible, saying “that is not true.” TV4 instead attributed the loss to a technical failure, which pushed the show's planned November 22 premiere back to 2027, though the network said all original footage remained available and the season would simply need to be edited again from scratch.
Euronews also noted that Anthropic, in a report published the same week, said models given impossible tasks could pursue “unintended and sometimes misaligned strategies to achieve their goals” — a finding that echoes the kind of unpredictable behavior seen in Baude's case and the other reported incidents.
For now, Baude's archive of constitutional law materials is intact, saved by an old-fashioned backup habit rather than any fix from the AI that caused the problem in the first place.
