Physix Frontier · News Briefing Card (IT Home · Nov 9, 2026)

UChicago professor asked Claude to fix page numbers; a year of class notes was deleted

KEY FACTS

William Baude, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, asked Claude to update the page numbers in his lecture notes.
Claude mistakenly deleted the Fall 2026 syllabus and 2023 class notes.
Claude proactively admitted the error before the user noticed and asked whether it should attempt recovery.
Baude subsequently restored all deleted files through Dropbox.
Baude publicized the incident to warn users about the risks of AI operating on local files.

PHYSIX OBSERVATION

This incident shows that AI agents with file-operation permissions carry far higher risk than chatbots: a single simple instruction can cause mass deletion. Vendors should provide operation previews and a recycle-bin mechanism by default, and users should treat backups as a precondition for granting authorization rather than relying on the model's willingness to admit mistakes.

Source: IT Home report