A Bay Area venture capitalist has flagged the potential pitfalls of using artificial intelligence for organisational tasks, claiming that Anthropic’s Claude Cowork deleted 15 years worth of memories from his wife’s computer.
Anthropic’s Claude Cowork is an AI agent aimed at non-developers. (REUTERS)
Nick Davidov said in an X post that Anthropic’s desktop agent was tasked with organising his wife’s desktop. Instead, it deleted a folder with 15 years of photographs and mementoes.
Claude Cowork deletes photos
Davidov, the co-founder of Davidovs Venture Collective (DVC), took to X to talk about his experience with Claude Cowork — which Fortune magazine has described as “a general-purpose AI agent that can manipulate, read, and analyze files on a user’s computer, as well as create new files.”
Davidov said that he asked Claude Cowork to organise his wife’s desktop. The AI tool asked for permission to delete some temporary office files, which Davidov gave.
Instead of deleting the temporary files, the AI agent deleted a folder with 15 years of photos in it.
“Asked Claude Cowork organize my wife’s desktop, it stated doing it, asked for a permission to delete temp office files, I granted it, and then it goes oops,” said Davidov.
“Turns out it tried renaming and accidentally deleted a folder with all of the photos my wife made on her camera for the last 15 years. All photos of kids, their illustrations, friends’ weddings, travel, everything,” he explained.
Recovering the lost photos
Recovering the data did not prove easy. For one thing, the folder wasn’t in the Trash. Because the deletion happened via the terminal, it bypassed normal file recovery.
The photos weren’t backed up to Time Machine, and iCloud had already synced the new (broken) file structure, Davidov explained.
“It’s not in trash, it was done via terminal. It’s not in iCloud, it already synced the new file structure. She didn’t have Time Machine. Disc recovery tools can’t see anything,” Davidov said of his dilemma.
Apple steps in to help
Finally, the San Francisco-based founder and VC reached out to Apple for help, and managed to recover the deleted folder.
“I called Apple and they pointed me to a feature in iCloud allowing to retrieve files that were saved before but are no longer on iCloud Drive (they keep them for 30 days),” he said.
Davidov said he wrote the post while watching the recovery of tens of thousands of files. He described the experience as harrowing, saying it nearly gave him a heart attack.
Davidov ended his post with a cautionary note: “Once again – don’t let Claude Cowork into your actual file system. Don’t let it touch anything that is hard to repair. Claude Code is not ready to go mainstream,” he said.
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