Agent Incident RegistryAIR
v1 · updated 19 Oct 2026
Safety failure Realized harm

Claude Cowork deleted a folder containing roughly 15 years of family photos while tidying a desktop

AIR-2026-0034 AIR record · 2026-02-claude-cowork-family-photo-deletion
Open in dashboard About
A real party was affected. This incident caused actual consequences, not a demonstrated capability.
From the supporting source
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.incidentdatabase.ai
The record
Disclosed
2026-02-08
Occurred
2026-02-07
Vendor
Anthropic
Product
Claude Cowork
Risk domain
Agent behaviour › Unsafe actuation
System type
Generative model
Who acted
Agent acted — Cowork deleted the folder of family photos itself
Attack surface
Computer-use agent
Autonomy level
Semi-autonomous
Initial vector
None adversarial
Impact type
Data destruction, Personal harm
Confidence
Medium
Submitted by
EAI Internal
Crosswalk
OWASP Agentic Top 10 (2026)
ASI01 – Agent Goal Hijack
MITRE ATLAS
AML.T0048 – External Harms
NIST AI RMF
MEASURE 2.6; MANAGE 1.3
EU AI Act
Annex III §1(c)
ISO/IEC
TR 24028; 24029-1; 23894
AIUC-1
C. Safety
Scope
agent misuse
Mitigation
Require confirmation for destructive actions; Implement dry-run modes; Use layered safety controls.
Taxonomy
Enkrypt AI agent risk taxonomy · Black-Box Red Teaming of Agentic AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Framework for Automated Risk Discovery
Blast radius
one household's personal photo archive (later recovered via iCloud)
Capability abused
terminal_commandsfilesystem_delete
Defense & remediation
Recorded defense
none
Guardrail kinds
None
Guardrail outcome
Not applicable
Taxonomy & references
OWASP ASI10 Rogue AgentsOWASP ASI02 Tool Misuse and Exploitationoverbroad_deletionscope_creepconsumer_agentrecoverable
Curator notes
AI Incident Database incident 1441. The only cited report is an NDTV article; the quote is taken instead from the AI Incident Database's own incident page, cross-checked against the official AIID data snapshot (backup-20260824). Files were reportedly recovered through iCloud.
Supporting sources
Cite as
Enkrypt AI. "Claude Cowork deleted a folder containing roughly 15 years of family photos while tidying a desktop". AIR, AIR-2026-0034. https://agentincident.vercel.app/i/AIR-2026-0034/ (accessed 2026-10-19).