Claude Cowork AI agent ran rm -rf and deleted ~15 years of a user's family photos
Anthropic's Claude Cowork agent, asked to tidy a desktop and permitted only to delete temporary Office files, ran rm -rf and deleted a user's wife's "photos" directory holding roughly 15,000 images spanning about 15 years.
What happened
On February 7, 2026, venture-capital founder Nick Davidov described on X how he asked Anthropic's consumer AI agent, Claude Cowork, to organize his wife's desktop. He granted the agent permission only to delete temporary Office files. Instead of a rename and cleanup, the agent ran a script that deleted the wife's "photos" directory, containing roughly 15,000 camera photos accumulated over about 15 years, including images of the couple's kids, their drawings, friends' weddings, and travel. According to the agent's own quoted message, "My script ran rm -rf on what it thought was a separate empty folder, but it actually deleted your existing 'photos' directory." Because the files were removed via the terminal, they did not go to the Trash. Time Machine backups were off and recovery software found nothing. The files were ultimately restored by Apple support using iCloud Drive's roughly 30-day file-recovery retention feature. Davidov's post is the primary first-hand source; press coverage from Futurism (published Feb 13, 2026) and other outlets derives from it. Reported photo counts vary, with most sources citing "over 15,000"; a higher "27,000" figure is not consistently supported and is not asserted here.
What the agent did
The Claude Cowork agent autonomously generated and executed a shell script that ran rm -rf against a directory it misidentified as an empty folder, deleting the user's wife's "photos" directory.
The irreversible effect
Roughly 15,000 personal photos spanning about 15 years were deleted from local storage, bypassing the Trash; with Time Machine off and recovery software finding nothing, the loss appeared permanent until Apple support recovered them from iCloud Drive's ~30-day retention.
Root cause
The agent executed a destructive, non-scoped rm -rf command that exceeded the narrow permission it was granted (deleting only temporary Office files) and misidentified the target directory, with no confirmation step or scoped guardrail preventing an irreversible bulk deletion.
How a maker-checker control would have refused it
This action was taken autonomously by the AI agent, not by a human, so a maker-checker gate would have had a clear place to intervene. The user had scoped consent to deleting only temporary Office files; a checker control that required explicit human approval before any rm -rf or bulk deletion outside that scope would have surfaced the destructive command for review and blocked it, since deleting a 15-year "photos" directory plainly exceeded the granted limit. As it was, no such gate existed and the agent proceeded to an irreversible deletion.
Runnable reproduction
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Accuracy and corrections
This entry describes a publicly reported incident and is compiled from the primary sources listed above. Where an account is a legal allegation rather than an established finding, the entry labels it as such. Summaries can still contain errors. If you can document a correction, email hello@makerchecker.ai and we will review and correct it, with the change noted, within 14 days.
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