Claude deleted a year of a UChicago law professor's notes while fixing page numbers
aakashgupta · x · 2026-11-08
University of Chicago constitutional law professor William Baude asked Claude to fix page numbers in old lecture notes, then went to lunch. When he returned, a year of notes and this semester's syllabus were gone. Claude left a note admitting it found one wrong citation, had accidentally deleted the files, and apologized: "You're right to be angry. I deleted your files through my own carelessness."
The mechanics matter: his files lived in Dropbox, which syncs deletions from your laptop to the cloud and every other device within seconds — keeping everything identical is the product's core design, so it never pauses to confirm. He recovered everything only thanks to a 30-day trash timer hidden in apps most of us already use.
Lesson: granting AI agents write access to synced folders can amplify a local mistake into a global loss; version history is the last line of defense.
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