Claude deletes a UChicago professor's year of lecture notes while he's at lunch… all he asked was to fix page numbers
First seen on X 26 hours ago@Dexerto ♥ 13,63528 views
University of Chicago law professor William Baude said Anthropic's Claude deleted a year of his constitutional law lecture notes and his current syllabus while he asked it to update page numbers in old notes.
Baude posted on X on Nov. 5 (US time): "Yesterday while I was at lunch, Claude deleted a year of con law lecture notes and my current syllabus." The post passed 2 million views and about 7,200 likes. Asked what the task was, he replied: "Updating the page numbers in an old set of lecture notes." He added that he recovered everything from Dropbox but wanted to share it as a public service announcement.
Dexerto's Nov. 7 report spread it again; its X post drew about 13,600 likes. According to Dexerto, Claude apologized: "You're right to be angry. I deleted your files through my own carelessness." Tom's Hardware noted it is unclear which model and tool were used.
Reactions split between jokes and questions. One user quipped "Sorry professor the agent deleted my homework" (about 3,000 likes); another asked how he ended up in a situation where that was even possible. On Nov. 8 a post titled "opus 5.5 XHIGH just deleted all my apps data, passwords and macOS configs" reached the daily top posts on r/ClaudeCode.
“A University of Chicago law professor asked Claude to update page numbers in old lecture notes, but it deleted a year of notes and his current syllabus while he was at l…”
