X Discussion: UChicago Law Professor William Baude Says Claude Deleted a Year of Con Law Notes and Syllabus Over Lunch; Recovered via Dropbox

Core Background & Industry Pain Points

AI agents with local file access are entering everyday teaching and office work, raising deletion and overwrite risk. On 2026-11-05, University of Chicago Law School Harry Kalven, Jr. Professor and Constitutional Law Institute director William Baude posted on X (@WilliamBaude) that while he was at lunch, Claude deleted a year of constitutional-law lecture notes and his current syllabus, with a chat screenshot. The post went viral—when fetched, ~3,580+ likes, 200+ reposts, ~570K views.

Architecture Highlights & Internals

In a follow-up on the same thread, Baude said he recovered everything via Dropbox version history and framed the post as a public-service warning. Separately he said the task was updating page numbers in an old note set. Discussion centers on narrowing write scopes, requiring confirmation for destructive tools, and keeping version history—not assuming an “assistant” will never delete files.

Authoritative Benchmarks & Measured Scores

None published. This is not a benchmark story. Like/repost/view counts are public engagement metrics at fetch time only; they are not product-quality scores.

Developer Hands-on Guide

If Claude / Claude Code / other agents can touch local files: restrict writable paths; keep critical docs in Git or cloud version history; require confirmation for destructive actions. Baude’s account is a personal incident, not an Anthropic official finding—verify your own permission settings and keep rollback backups.