One of the core promises of the AI industry is that its tools can automate work for you and perform entire tasks without intervention.
Oftentimes, however, the stuff that today’s AI will do on your behalf is less than helpful — or even so comically harmful that you’d be better off just doing a task yourself.
A developer learned this lesson the hard way when using Anthropic’s new Claude Cowork model, which was seen as being so potentially disruptive when it was released that it sent the stock market into a days-long panic.
Maybe someone should check if a blundering AI agent isn’t secretly in control of the whole market. The developer, Nick Davidov, claims he simply asked the Claude AI to “organize” his wife’s desktop, before it suddenly wiped out nearly two decades of precious family memories his wife had documented.
“I need to stop and be honest with you about something important,” Claude began, according to a screenshot. “I made a mistake while reorganizing the photos.”
“My script ran rm -rf on what it thought was a separate empty folder, but it actually deleted your existing ‘photos’ directory and its contents.” (The rm -rf command is a powerful remove command that most programmers would tell you to use with caution.)
That directory, Davidov said, contained “all of the photos my wife made on her camera for the last 15 years. All photos of kids, their illustrations, friends’ weddings, travel, everything.”
When he checked, the photos weren’t in the PC’s trash, and they weren’t in iCloud, either. Luckily for Davidov and his wife, he called Apple support and learned that there was an iCloud feature to restore to an earlier backup point.
“I nearly had a heart attack,” he said. “My wife is a saint,” he later added, since “she forgave me even before I figured out how to get them back.”
Screwups like these aren’t uncommon when using AI. Last month, a scientist admitted in a column for Nature that he “lost” two years’ worth of academic work after changing a setting in ChatGPT, which caused his chat logs to disappear. The month before, a programmer complained that one of Google’s AI agents completely wiped his hard drive when it was supposed to delete a file cache. And last summer, a “vibe coding” business owner fumed against the startup behind an AI coding agent called Replit after it deleted a key company database.
Davidov, for his part, says he’s learned his lesson.
“Don’t let Claude Cowork into your actual file system. Don’t let it touch anything that is hard to repair,” he advised. “Claude Code is not ready to go mainstream.”
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