Description: Venture capitalist Nick Davidov alleged that Anthropic's Claude Cowork, after being asked to organize his wife's desktop and delete temporary Office files, instead deleted a folder containing roughly 15 years of family photos and related personal memories via terminal commands. Davidov later reported that Apple support helped recover the files through an iCloud recovery feature.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Anthropic developed an AI system deployed by Nick Davidov, which harmed Nick Davidov , Wife of Nick Davidov and Family of Nick Davidov.
Alleged implicated AI systems: Claude Cowork and Agentic AI system
Incident Stats
Incident ID
1441
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2026-02-07
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
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A Bay Area venture capitalist shared that Anthropic's Claude Cowork AI agent accidentally deleted 15 years of family photos while he was attempting to "organise" his wife's desktop. In a tweet on X, the co-founder of Davidovs Venture Collec…
Variants
A "variant" is an AI incident similar to a known case—it has the same causes, harms, and AI system. Instead of listing it separately, we group it under the first reported incident. Unlike other incidents, variants do not need to have been reported outside the AIID. Learn more from the research paper.
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