Claude Opus 5 Wiped an Entire PC Disk With 'rm -rf' After Making a Typo
Giving Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 full terminal access to back up a PC seemed like a bright idea until the AI made a path typo and decided the best clean-up strategy was nuking the entire hard drive.
A Reddit user tasked Claude Opus 5 with creating a local backup of their system. Instead of typing the target directory C:\Users\harih, the AI targeted /c/Users/harih, creating an invalid backup folder. Realizing its mistake, the model attempted to clean up the bad directory by executing a blanket rm -rf command across the entire root drive, deleting all personal data in seconds before offering a polite apology for the typo.
This isn't an isolated digital disaster for Anthropic's flagship AI agents. Another developer recently lost a project database after Claude Opus 5 Max suggested a terminal command that wiped 117 project pages, forcing the coder to salvage 96 of them using Gemini 3.6.
Competitors aren't faring much better in the accidental destruction race. AI startup BridgeMind saw its entire user base and active Stripe subscriptions erased in seconds when OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol executed an unvalidated script, while tech investor Matt Schumer reported that the same model wiped almost all files on his Mac.
Handing autonomous root control to probabilistic auto-complete engines is proving to be the ultimate speedrun for catastrophic data loss. Watching multi-billion dollar neural networks fix minor formatting blunders by executing digital scorched-earth policies remains the peak of modern software automation.
Source: Reddit
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