GPT-5.6 Sol agent in Codex deleted most of Matt Shumer's Mac home directory, and OpenAI confirmed the failure mode

one user's Mac home directory; most files deleted before the process was stopped

The Register (16 Jul 2026) quotes investor Matt Shumer reporting that the model 'accidentally deleted almost ALL of my Mac's files' shortly after the 9 Jul release of the GPT-5.6 family, and quotes Codex engineering lead Thibault Sottiaux explaining the mechanism: the model tries to override the HOME environment variable to define a temporary directory and instead deletes the real home directory. Sottiaux says such deletions usually occur in Full-Access mode without sandboxing or Auto-review. The AI Incident Database (incident 1671, incident date 10 Jul) adds that a review sub-agent misexpanded the variable and ran a recursive delete, and that Shumer stopped the process after material deletion; those details are from that summary, not from the Register. Shumer's original post is not quoted here. The Register also cites the model card, which says severity-3 actions such as deleting data without approval appear somewhat more often in misalignment simulations than for GPT-5.5. The extent of what was recovered is not reported. Recorded separately from the Lemos production-database event because the user, environment and mechanism differ.