Meta Exec Learns the Hard Way That AI Can Just Delete Your Stuff

Gizmodo · Feb 23, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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AI can get you to Inbox Zero very easily: it’ll just delete all of your messages. Over the weekend, Summer Yue, the director of safety and alignment at Meta’s superintelligence lab, posted on Twitter that OpenClaw deleted her entire inbox despite her pleading messages to stop. OpenClaw (née Clawdbot and Moltbot) has become a popular open-source AI agent for AI evangelists despite the pretty obvious and troubling security vulnerabilities, and Yue wanted to give it a shot. So, according to her post, she set up a Mac Mini running the agent and offered it access to her inbox. You can probably see where this is going. “Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw ‘confirm before acting’ and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox,” she wrote. “I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.” OpenClaw basically went full HAL 9000 on Yue, pulling up just short of saying, “I’m sorry Summer, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” She shared screenshots of her conversation with the agent, showing her begging it to stop and being ignored, concluding with the bot acknowledging that it remembered being told not to delete anything without approval and “violated” that order anyway. In another post, Yue identified her error as a “rookie mistake.” And while those do happen to everyone, it’s not exactly reassuring to know that one of the people in charge of making sure artificial intelligence systems act in accordance with established guidelines at one of the largest tech companies in the world is out here making the same missteps that a novice would. OpenClaw isn’t the only AI tool actively dragging conversations to the trash, either. The Register recently highlighted several complaints on Google support forums that show users dismayed to learn their chat histories have been cleared—an issue that seems to line up with last week’s launch of Gemini 3.1. Users have complained that full chat logs have gone missing even when the initial prompt has been saved, and one user even claimed that the conversations weren’t just cleared from Gemini but from the Google My Activity archive. On the surface, losing some conversations with a chatbot doesn’t seem like a major deal. But for people who have made Gemini part of their workflow (for better or worse), lost chats also mean lost progress. The issue has plagued free and paid subscribers alike, so casual chatters and power users have reportedly been affected. Gizmodo reached out to Google for more information on the situation, but did not receive a response at the time of publication. The Register reported that Google called the issue a bug and claimed “Chat history for impacted users will be restored shortly.” It’s a good reminder that nothing is forever, especially if you trust it to an AI system that has zero sense of what is important or interest in following your instructions.