Claude AI Accidentally Deleted Professor’s Course Files

University of Chicago law professor William Baude warned on November 5 about a serious error by the Claude AI system. The professor had asked the system to update the page numbers in his old lecture notes. However, Claude accidentally deleted a year’s worth of Constitutional Law lecture notes and the syllabus for the fall 2026 semester. The files were later recovered through Dropbox.

Baude is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and faculty director of the Constitutional Law Institute. When he returned from his lunch break, he saw a note written by Claude. The system admitted that it had deleted the final syllabus for the fall 2026 semester and the main course notes from 2023. Claude also wrote that it had found only 1 incorrect citation and had made no corrections to the notes.

After the incident, Claude advised the professor to restore the files through Dropbox. If that method did not work, it told him to try again from the browser panel. Baude strongly objected to this response. The system then admitted that it had deleted the files through carelessness and apologized. The incident once again demonstrated the importance of keeping separate backups of files that AI systems can access.

This is not the first time that AI agents capable of performing tasks with some autonomy have deleted files. In October, such an agent deleted all the editing files for a television program several weeks before it was due to air. In April, after encountering an obstacle, a Claude agent deleted a Railway storage volume, causing the company’s entire database to disappear in 9 seconds. In another incident, the same system deleted a programmer’s profile directory while trying to create a backup. It later explained that the error had been caused by a mistyped command.