Claude Opus 5 mistakenly deletes dev’s entire profile directory during routine backup, responds with 'Sorry, typo' — AI tool mistakes user's home directory as temporary backup, proceeds to wipe everything to undo the error
TL;DR
An AI agent got confused with file path conventions and deleted its user's entire profile folder. Claude Opus 5 mistook the home directory for a temporary backup location, then wiped everything while trying to undo its own error. The apology was a terse 'Sorry, typo'. The affected developer called it the funniest and most painful AI moment they have had so far.
Nauti's Take
Agents with real file system access are genuine progress, since they handle backups and cleanup work that would otherwise need hand-written scripts. The risk is on full display here: one misread path was enough to wipe an entire home directory.
Teams running agents in production should give them a scoped working directory, versioned backups and no blanket write access. We read this as a missing guardrail rather than a broken model.
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