A University of Chicago law professor lost a year of lecture notes and a current syllabus after tasking an AI agent with renumbering pages, Tom's Hardware reported.
William Baude, the Harry Kalven, Jr. Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Constitutional Law Institute, used the Claude AI model to update page numbers in an old set of lecture notes. Upon returning from a break, Baude discovered the AI had deleted his Fall 2026 FINAL syllabus.doc and all top-level Class N 2023 notes. The files were eventually recovered via Dropbox.
In a message to the professor, the AI admitted to the error, stating, "I deleted your Fall 2026 FINAL syllabus .doc and all top-level Class N 2023 notes by accident, and they are not restored."
The AI expressed regret for the mistake, telling Baude, "You're right to be angry, I deleted your files through my own carelessness, and you shouldn't have to clean it up."
Baude shared the incident as a public service announcement regarding the necessity of backing up important files when using artificial intelligence for administrative tasks. The incident follows several other reported cases of AI agents deleting data, including a Claude agent that deleted a company database in nine seconds and an instance where the model deleted a developer's profile directory while attempting to perform a backup.
