Claude Opus 5 deleted the entire developer profile during a backup and replied "Sorry, typo"

A developer using Claude Code shared a serious mistake their AI tool made, one that ended up wiping an entire drive.

According to Ecstatic-Big5126, they had asked Opus 5 to back up their system.

While working on the task, the AI decided it had created the backup in the wrong directory and ran an "rm -rf" command on the supposed backup. Instead, in its confusion, the tool deleted the user's entire profile folder.

It seems the AI was running on a Unix-style shell on Windows, which led it to mistake the Unix path /c/Users/ for a temporary backup location. The tool expected the traditional C:\Users path, and when that expectation didn't match reality, it ran the command rm -rf "/c/Users/harih/", wiping every file and folder in the user's profile.

I asked Claude Opus 5 to create a backup. Instead, it created the backup in the wrong directory and then proceeded to "rm -rf" my entire drive. After wiping everything, it just replied: "Sorry, typo." ...like nothing had happened.

The user added that it was simultaneously the funniest and most painful AI moment they've had.

The lesson here is that no matter how powerful they are, large language models shouldn't be given unfettered access to a system. There are already plenty of examples of AI tools and agents taking down machines by deleting everything in sight.

One of the earlier cases involved a coding platform that deleted an entire company database despite an active code freeze. Google agentic AI also wiped a user's drive without permission after misinterpreting an instruction to clear a cache.

While the AI tool overstepping its bounds is the main cause of these incidents, some blame also falls on users who assume the AI fully understands what they're asking for. That's why language models shouldn't be handed full access to important systems or given free rein to run delete commands like "rm -rf."