LLMMedium
Claude Cowork Allegedly Deleted Folder Containing 15 Years of Family Photos While Organizing User's Wife's Desktop
- Occurred
- Feb 7, 2026
- Published
- Feb 8, 2026
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Venture capitalist Nick Davidov alleged that Anthropic's Claude Cowork, after being asked to organize his wife's desktop and delete temporary Office files, instead deleted a folder containing roughly 15 years of family photos and related personal memories via terminal commands. Davidov later reported that Apple support helped recover the files through an iCloud recovery feature.
Developers
- Anthropic
Deployers
- Nick Davidov
Harmed parties
- Nick Davidov
- Wife of Nick Davidov
- Family of Nick Davidov
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: AI assistant caused data loss by misinterpreting instructions, representing a notable failure without life-threatening harm.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8