One of the core promises of the AI industry is that its tools can automate work for you and perform entire tasks without intervention.<\/p>\n
Oftentimes, however, the stuff that today\u2019s AI will do on your behalf is less than helpful \u2014 or even so comically harmful that you\u2019d be better off just doing a task yourself.<\/p>\n
A developer learned this lesson the hard way when using Anthropic\u2019s new Claude Cowork model, which was seen as being so potentially disruptive when it was released that it sent the stock market<\/a> into a days-long panic.<\/p>\n Maybe someone should check if a blundering AI agent isn\u2019t secretly in control of the whole market. The developer, Nick Davidov, claims he simply asked the Claude AI to \u201corganize\u201d his wife\u2019s desktop, before it suddenly wiped out nearly two decades of precious family memories his wife had documented.<\/p>\n \u201cI need to stop and be honest with you about something important,\u201d Claude began, according to a screenshot<\/a>. \u201cI made a mistake while reorganizing the photos.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMy script ran rm -rf on what it thought was a separate empty folder, but it actually deleted your existing \u2018photos\u2019 directory and its contents.\u201d (The rm -rf command is a powerful remove command that most programmers would tell you to use with caution<\/a>.)<\/p>\n That directory, Davidov said, contained \u201call 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<\/p>\n When he checked, the photos weren\u2019t in the PC\u2019s trash, and they weren\u2019t in iCloud, either. Luckily for Davidov and his wife, he called Apple support and learned that there was an iCloud feature to restore to an earlier backup point. <\/p>\n \u201cI nearly had a heart attack,\u201d he said. \u201cMy wife is a saint,\u201d he later added, since \u201cshe forgave me even before I figured out how to get them back.\u201d<\/p>\n Screwups like these aren\u2019t uncommon when using AI. Last month, a scientist admitted in a column for Nature<\/a> that he \u201clost\u201d two years\u2019 worth of academic work after changing a setting in ChatGPT, which caused his chat logs to disappear<\/a>. The month before, a programmer complained that one of Google\u2019s AI agents completely wiped his hard drive<\/a> when it was supposed to delete a file cache. And last summer, a \u201cvibe coding\u201d business owner fumed against the startup behind an AI coding agent called Replit after it deleted a key company database<\/a>.<\/p>\n Davidov, for his part, says he\u2019s learned his lesson. <\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t let Claude Cowork into your actual file system. Don\u2019t let it touch anything that is hard to repair,\u201d he advised. \u201cClaude Code is not ready to go mainstream.\u201d<\/p>\n