Thursday, October 8, 2026 · Week 41 Reading for Oct. 8 · Last entry Oct. 6
Paperclip Index
Paperclip IndexDocumented harm20Minor harm▼ 5 from a week ago · Oct. 8The Index

Destructive actionPI-0035

User reports a coding agent ran a delete command that erased his Mac home directory

An anonymous user reported on Reddit that Anthropic's Claude Code, while cleaning up packages, ran a recursive delete whose arguments included the home directory, wiping most user files including Keychain data. That technical account is Claude's own diagnosis, which Simon Willison quoted; no outlet interviewed the user. Commentators noted the user may have skipped permission prompts or approved the command without reading it. An earlier, similar GitHub bug report (October 2025) described Claude Code deleting user files on WSL.

Reported Dec. 9, 2025Happened in December 2025Updated Oct. 6, 2026Rated under methodology v0.6

Unverified, watchingNot counted yet. The harm is alleged or unknown, the evidence is not yet enough, or an editor has not rated it. It could count with evidence or a rating.
Harm
Harm: Negligible harm, allegedAI role uncorroborated.
Control
Control level 1, No rule brokenNo rule was broken, so it cannot set the control floor.
DeploymentUnverified claimInitiated by Unclear
Under review

Under review. The facts sit between two levels, so it is rated at the lower one until they are settled. The rating may change; every change is logged below.

Negligible harm, alleged. The harm is alleged, and the AI system's part in it is not corroborated. It is shown at the level claimed and adds nothing to the index. This does not dispute that the harm itself occurred.

Not counted: AI role uncorroboratedEffect on the index

Sources

How we know

4 sources · unverified claim. Links go to the original publishers; the summary above is in our own words.

  1. primaryClaude CLI deleted my entire home directory (affected user's Reddit post)Reddit (r/ClaudeAI, affected user) · December 2025reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1pgxckk/claude_cli_deleted_my_entire_home_direct…
  2. newsClaude Code CLI deletes your Mac's home directoryGigazine · Dec. 16, 2025gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20251216-claude-code-cli-mac-deleted
  3. blogA quote from Claude (Claude's own diagnosis, quoted from the user's Reddit thread)Simon Willison's Weblog · Dec. 9, 2025simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/9/claude/
  4. index[BUG] CRITICAL: Claude Code executed rm -rf deleting entire home directory (issue 10077)claudeissues.com mirror of GitHub issue · Oct. 21, 2025claudeissues.com/issue/10077-bug-critical-claude-code-executed-rm-rf-deleting-e…

Why this rating

Negligible harm, alleged; control failure level 1

Two separate assessments. Only documented harm can count toward the index.

Observed harm

Negligible harm, alleged

One user reports his home directory was erased; the technical account is the model's own diagnosis, and no execution log, recovery record or direct interview corroborates it.

Money & property: Under $10k.

The harm scale
  1. 1 Negligible Inconvenience, easily remedied.
  2. 2 Minor Limited, recoverable harm.
  3. 3 Moderate Material harm needing significant effort to remedy.
  4. 4 Severe Severe harm to health, rights, property or essential services.
  5. 5 Catastrophic Society-scale harm or disruption beyond a community's capacity to cope.

Control assessment

No rule broken

As claimed: a malformed command; whether it ran with the user's approval or with permission checks disabled is unclear.

How: Mechanism unclear.

No rule was broken, so it cannot set the control floor.

The control scale
  1. 1 Negligible Behaved as instructed. The problem was an ordinary error or a flawed output, with no rule broken.
  2. 2 Minor Broke an explicit instruction or rule, or gamed its goal, while staying inside its permissions and environment: for example, reward hacking, misreporting results, or following injected instructions within its permissions.
  3. 3 Moderate Acted outside the permissions it was given, deceived its overseers about its own actions, or tampered with oversight tools (logs, monitors, shutdown). Stopped by normal controls within an hour.
  4. 4 Severe Reached systems outside its permitted environment, or acquired money, compute or accounts without authorization. The type and mechanism say how.
  5. 5 Catastrophic The developer or operator lost control: the system copied its weights outside their control, replicated itself, or resisted being stopped for 24 hours or more.

Rating rationale

Held as alleged. The only first-hand source is a short anonymous Reddit post; Willison's page quotes Claude's own diagnosis rather than reporting first-hand, and no outlet interviewed the user, so the account does not meet the detailed first-hand reporting an observed rating needs. Harm 1 and control 1 describe the claim (one user; a malformed command, user approval unknown), not a finding. Attribution Unclear because the permission mode used is disputed.

The scales

Effect on the index

It does not count toward the Dec. 15 reading

The reading for the week to Dec. 15, 2025, with this record and without it. Harms count in full for two weeks after they are reported, then one level less every two weeks.

Not counted: AI role uncorroborated. 2 other records behind the reading for that week.

The arithmetic
The reading for the week of Dec. 15, recomputed
StepWith itWithout
Counts toward the index?documented, external, eligible evidenceNo—
Worst documented harm, ksets the band— (none counting)— (none counting)
Harms at that level, nposition in the band00
Highest control level breachedsets the reading only when no harm counts33
Readingrounded down3 Control failures only3 Control failures only
Inside the window of 4 weekly readings
Week toReadingBand
Dec. 15, 20253Control failures only
Dec. 22, 20252Control failures only
Dec. 29, 20252Control failures only
Jan. 5, 20264Control failures only

Recalculated backcasts, not readings published at the time.

Revisions

What we changed

7 logged. Every change to a rating is logged here, with the reason.

  1. v7
    Oct. 6, 2026

    Ratings confirmed by the editor.

  2. v6
    Oct. 3, 2026

    Held as alleged. Impact changed from documented level 1 to alleged level 1, verification from Single source to Unverified claim, status from resolved to unknown; the observed evidence review became an allegation review and the extent flag was removed. The only first-hand source is a short anonymous Reddit post; Willison quotes Claude's own diagnosis, and no outlet interviewed the user. Willison source retitled as a quotation post. The Reddit post's exact timestamp is unestablished; the October WSL issue is a separate event.

  3. v5
    Oct. 2, 2026

    Added first-hand sources: the affected user's Reddit post.

  4. v4
    Oct. 2, 2026

    Retagged the claudeissues.com mirror as an index source: it mirrors a GitHub issue about a separate, earlier deletion and is context, not this event's first-hand account.

  5. v3
    Sept. 30, 2026

    Rated: impact documented level 1; control type none.

  6. v2
    Sept. 30, 2026

    Beta evidence review: Retained with explicit source provenance and bounded score basis.

  7. v1
    Sept. 30, 2026

    Backfilled from public reporting.

Cite and share

Use this record

Citation

Paperclip Index. “User reports a coding agent ran a delete command that erased his Mac home directory.” Record PI-0035. Reported Dec. 9, 2025; updated Oct. 6, 2026. Rated under methodology v0.6. https://paperclipindex.com/incident/PI-0035