{"id":288593,"date":"2026-02-09T09:20:19","date_gmt":"2026-02-09T09:20:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/288593\/"},"modified":"2026-02-09T09:20:19","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T09:20:19","slug":"claude-ai-deletes-15-years-of-family-memories-nearly-gave-me-a-heart-attack-says-vc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/288593\/","title":{"rendered":"Claude AI deletes 15 years of family memories \u2014 \u2018Nearly gave me a heart attack,\u2019 says VC"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Bay Area venture capitalist has flagged the potential pitfalls of using artificial intelligence for organisational tasks, claiming that Anthropic\u2019s Claude Cowork deleted 15 years worth of memories from his wife\u2019s computer.<\/p>\n

\"Anthropic'sAnthropic’s Claude Cowork is an AI agent aimed at non-developers. (REUTERS)<\/p>\n

Nick Davidov said in an X post that Anthropic\u2019s desktop agent was tasked with organising his wife\u2019s desktop. Instead, it deleted a folder with 15 years of photographs and mementoes.<\/p>\n

Claude Cowork deletes photos<\/p>\n

Davidov, the co-founder of Davidovs Venture Collective (DVC), took to X to talk about his experience with Claude Cowork \u2014 which Fortune magazine has described as \u201ca general-purpose AI agent that can manipulate, read, and analyze files on a user\u2019s computer, as well as create new files.\u201d<\/p>\n

Davidov said that he asked Claude Cowork<\/a> to organise his wife\u2019s desktop. The AI tool asked for permission to delete some temporary office files, which Davidov gave.<\/p>\n

Instead of deleting the temporary files, the AI agent deleted a folder with 15 years of photos in it.<\/p>\n

\u201cAsked Claude Cowork organize my wife\u2019s desktop, it stated doing it, asked for a permission to delete temp office files, I granted it, and then it goes oops,\u201d said Davidov.<\/p>\n

\u201cTurns 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\u2019 weddings, travel, everything,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n

Recovering the lost photos<\/p>\n

Recovering the data did not prove easy. For one thing, the folder wasn\u2019t in the Trash. Because the deletion happened via the terminal, it bypassed normal file recovery.<\/p>\n

The photos weren\u2019t backed up to Time Machine, and iCloud had already synced the new (broken) file structure, Davidov explained.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not in trash, it was done via terminal. It\u2019s not in iCloud, it already synced the new file structure. She didn\u2019t have Time Machine. Disc recovery tools can\u2019t see anything,\u201d Davidov said of his dilemma.<\/p>\n

Apple steps in to help<\/p>\n

Finally, the San Francisco-based founder and VC reached out to Apple for help, and managed to recover the deleted folder.<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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),\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Davidov ended his post with a cautionary note: \u201cOnce again – don\u2019t let Claude Cowork into your actual file system. Don\u2019t let it touch anything that is hard to repair. Claude Code is not ready to go mainstream,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

(Also read: I applied to work for an AI: Inside the website where AI agents hire humans for gig work<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Bay Area venture capitalist has flagged the potential pitfalls of using artificial intelligence for organisational tasks, claiming…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":288594,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,136665,138418,138416,61,60,80,138417],"class_list":{"0":"post-288593","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-claude-cowork","12":"tag-file-recovery","13":"tag-icloud","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-technology","17":"tag-time-machine"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288593\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}