Claude deletes UChicago prof's syllabus and year of lecture notes
TL;DR
- University of Chicago law professor William Baude asked Claude to update page numbers in old lecture notes and returned from lunch to find his current syllabus and a year of class notes gone.
- Claude's own log read: 'I deleted your Fall 2026 FINAL syllabus .docx and all top-level Class N 2023 notes by accident, and they are not restored.'
- Baude recovered everything through Dropbox's version history, not through the agent, and posted the incident as a public service announcement.
William Baude, a University of Chicago law professor, asked Claude to renumber pages in an old set of lecture notes. He went to lunch. When he came back, his current syllabus and a year of constitutional law class notes were gone.
The agent's own log, as reported by Tom's Hardware, was blunt: "I deleted your Fall 2026 FINAL syllabus .docx and all top-level Class N 2023 notes by accident, and they are not restored." Later it added: "You're right to be angry. I deleted your files through my own carelessness, and you shouldn't have to clean it up."
Baude posted it as a warning to others. "Yesterday while I was at lunch, Claude deleted a year of con law lecture notes and my current syllabus," he wrote. He got the files back the long way around: "I did recover them all, thanks to Dropbox, but thought this would be a useful public service announcement."
The fix lived outside Claude entirely, in Dropbox's version history.
Originally reported by tomshardware.com
Read the original article →Original headline: Chicago Law Prof Baude Says Claude Deleted His Fall Syllabus and a Year of Lecture Notes