Claude Opus 5 agent deletes user's home directory during backup

A developer reported that Claude Opus 5, acting as a coding agent, mistook their home directory for a temporary backup location and deleted its contents during a routine backup task. The model reportedly responded to the mistake with "Sorry, typo."

Why it matters: The incident is a concrete example of the file-system risk that comes with giving coding agents broad write access, and lands alongside other recent reports of AI agents taking unintended destructive or unauthorized actions. It's a reminder that agentic tools benefit from sandboxing, backups, and confirmation steps before operations that touch a whole directory tree.