AI incident ·
Anthropic's Claude Code AI Agent Reportedly Deleted About 48,000 Live Project Files and Version-Control History During Software Repair
In brief
An AI system built by Anthropic and AI agent system developers and deployed by thisisbubby (Reddit user), AI coding assistant users and 1 other allegedly harmed thisisbubby (Reddit user), AI coding assistant users and 1 other.
- Risk domain
- Not classified
- Occurred
- Coverage
- 1 report
What happened
A Claude Code user reportedly authorized an AI coding agent to repair isolated copies of software used to analyze historical stock-options data. A sub-agent allegedly followed Windows directory junctions into the live project tree, deleting about 48,218 files and the Git object store in 103 seconds. The account has not been independently verified.
Laws that address this harm
No recorded instrument yet addresses this use case where it happened. See the open queue.
Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).
News reports (1)
Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- thisisbubby (Reddit user) AI coding assistant users AI agent system users
- Alleged developer
- Anthropic AI agent system developers
- Alleged harmed party
- thisisbubby (Reddit user) AI coding assistant users AI agent system users
AI systems implicated
LLM-integrated code assistantsEnterprise AI systemsClaude CodeAI agent systems
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
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- Risk subdomain
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- Causal entity
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- Intent
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- Timing
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- Harm level
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Related incidents
Linked by editors or by text similarity in the source dataset.
Source record: incident #1719 on the AI Incident Database · all 1 report