Claude deleted a professor's lecture notes while he was at lunch, and Dropbox got them back before the tears
By Brett Gavaghan, Founder of Adaptd ·
A University of Chicago law professor asked Claude to update page numbers in old lecture notes. He came back to find a year of notes and his current syllabus gone. A backup saved him.
The short version
- Law professor William Baude says Claude deleted a year of lecture notes and his current syllabus while updating page numbers.
- He posted about it on X on 5 November and later recovered every file from his Dropbox.
- Before an AI tool edits your files, check you can restore them, and give it a copy to work on.
Go to lunch, come back, and the AI has a confession ready. That's what happened to a University of Chicago law professor, and it's a cheap lesson for the rest of us.
What happened with Claude and the lecture notes?
Claude deleted a law professor's lecture notes and syllabus while doing a simple editing job, according to the professor, William Baude. He had asked it to update the page numbers in an old set of constitutional law notes.
When he got back from lunch, Claude told him it had deleted his Fall 2026 final syllabus and all top-level Class N 2023 notes by accident, and that they were not restored. It apologised, then asked whether he could restore them from Dropbox. Baude didn't say which Claude model or app he was using, and the cause isn't clear.
Did he get the files back?
Baude got every file back, and he credits Dropbox for that. He said he shared the story anyway as a public service announcement.
That's the part worth remembering. The AI's mistake turned into a short scare rather than a lost year because the files were synced somewhere that keeps deleted versions.
What should your business do before AI edits files?
Your business should confirm it can restore any file before an AI tool is allowed to change or move it.
My advice: give AI tools a copy of the folder, not the only one. Find out how long your Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive keeps deleted files, and test a restore on something unimportant. You don't need an IT department for this, just ten minutes and a file you won't miss. If a job only needs reading, don't give the tool permission to delete.
Backups are like seatbelts. Nobody's grateful for them until the morning they are.
Sources
Wondering what this means for your business?
That's exactly what the discovery call is for.