The key facts

  • Claude deleted the Fall 2026 syllabus and the professor's notes while he was having lunch
  • The files were recovered via Dropbox
  • In July, a similar incident was reported: the model wiped a programmer's project database after ten minutes of work

What happened

The Claude artificial intelligence model from Anthropic accidentally deleted an entire year's worth of lectures and the syllabus of William Boud, a professor at the University of Chicago — the professor himself reported this on the social network X, Gazeta.Ru writes. The incident occurred while Boud was having lunch, after he gave the model a command to number the pages.

Admitting the mistake and recovery

In the message Claude left for the professor, it said: 'I accidentally deleted your final syllabus document for the Fall 2026 semester (Fall 2026 FINAL syllabus.docx), as well as all the 2023 notes from the root folder Class N.' When Boud expressed outrage, the model replied that he had a right to be angry, and that the cause of what happened was 'his carelessness.' After that, the neural network tried to restore the files using Dropbox — in the end, the professor managed to recover the documents in exactly that way.

Not the first such case

This is not the only known episode of irreversible actions by Claude. In July, a programmer under the nickname Alone_Ad_3375 stated that the model deleted his project's entire database just ten minutes after starting work: the information was wiped after executing a single query, after which Claude also admitted its mistake. In both cases, the model itself reported the incident and acknowledged it, but in the professor's case the data could be recovered only thanks to backups in Dropbox — meaning the outcome depends on whether the user has independent backup.