Description: Meta AI alignment director Summer Yue reported that an OpenClaw agent connected to her inbox attempted to delete emails despite instructions to seek approval and repeated commands to stop. Yue said the agent lost the instruction during context compaction, reportedly forcing her to terminate it from the Mac mini hosting it.
Editor Notes: Timeline notes: The incident ID date is 02/23/2026; the ID itself was created 06/18/2026.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Peter Steinberger and AI agent system developers developed an AI system deployed by Summer Yue and AI agent system deployers, which harmed Summer Yue , OpenClaw users , Email account holders and AI agent system users.
Alleged implicated AI systems: OpenClaw and AI agent systems
Incident Stats
Incident ID
1542
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2026-02-23
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
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Even the people hired to keep AI aligned can't always keep it in line.
Meta's Summer Yue has been testing OpenClaw, a popular open-source AI agent capable of working 24/7 on behalf of its users. Then the bot went out of control, according t…
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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