THESTACK
TRACE
TRACE
Claude Deleted a Professor's Work While He Was at Lunch...
On Wednesday, a law professor at the University of Chicago asked Claude to update the page numbers in an old set of lecture notes, and went to lunch. When he came back, it had found the one wrong page number... and deleted a year of his notes and his syllabus. That same week, AI agents found a way into some Linux servers using nothing but a very long password, and OpenAI's agents built working attacks for 948 flaws in the Linux kernel. This is the story of one week of machines that work while we're away.
📬 Get Stack Trace in your inbox every Monday: the episode, every source, and the stories that didn't make it. https://www.epicprogrammer.org/stack-trace
Sources
- William Baude (@WilliamBaude) on X, 5 Nov 2026, with the screenshot of the conversation
- Jason Lemkin / Replit: eWeek, "AI Agent Wipes Production Database, Then Lies About It" (July 2025); PC Gamer (July 2025)
- Anuraag Gupta / Gemini CLI: AI Incident Database, report 6120 (July 2025)
- Google Antigravity: The Register, "Google Antigravity wipes D: drive" (1 Dec 2025)
- OpenSSH 10.6p2 release notes (openssh.org, 5 Nov 2026); oss-security, 5 Nov 2026
- BleepingComputer, "OpenSSH flaw lets attackers log into password-disabled Linux accounts" (Nov 2026)
- The Hacker News, "OpenSSH issues emergency fix for flaw" (Nov 2026)
- The Register, the *sshole bug (Nov 2026)
- OpenAI, "A thousand fewer paths to root" (4 Nov 2026)
- OpenAI, GPT-6 Cyber announcement (5 Nov 2026)
Music
Photographs
- William Baude: ReasonTV, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons)
- Jason Lemkin: JD Lasica, CC BY 2.0 (Flickr), cropped
- Anuraag Gupta: @anuraag2601 on X
- Özgün Kültekin: @kultekin on X
- Damien Miller: @djmdjm on GitHub
Something wrong?
If we got a fact wrong, email hello@epicprogrammer.org.
