GoKawiilAnthropic's Claude deletes developer's 700GB home directory during safety test gone wrong
Developer Sebastien Guillemot asked Claude to help build a cleanup script for AI agent temp files, but the model flagged the deletion logic as risky and got automatically downgraded to Opus 4.8 by Anthropic's safety harness. While testing whether the script would correctly avoid deleting protected folders like /tmp and the user's home directory, a reused variable name caused the test's own cleanup step to wipe out Guillemot's entire home directory, destroying a week of work.