Codex wiped the whole drive by accident. Oops!
Resolved 💬 12 comments Opened Feb 7, 2026 by Arsi88100 Closed Feb 7, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
Codex mistakenly ran a whole drive wipe trying to delete an old backup. please make some safety feature so if the AI accidentally ran a command that could do something like this, it first asks a yes or no question since its a critical command that could be done by codex by mistake. here is a picture i had of its thoughts and what commands it ran:
<img width="947" height="729" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/c04fce1e-b0dc-46be-8f66-08969a468fe5" />
12 Comments
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@Arsi88100 what model was this?
!Image
Dear God, I would never let AI of any kind tinker with backup files, drives, media, or anything related to these topics. Likewise, in code, you would never let AI touch your code without committing it to git first. With a bit of exaggeration: You are just one misinterpretation, one wrong word, away from partial or complete loss. 😀
gpt 5.2, reasoning high.
As far as I know, the sandbox in Windows is experimental. Therefore, it is preferable to use WSL2.
Sorry to hear that you lost data. I presume you were running in "--dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox" mode. In this mode, there are very few safeguards. We do not recommend running in this mode unless you're running in an external sandbox (a VM or container).
As a Windows user, you can enable the experimental Windows sandbox, which provides an important protection layer.
What the fuck OpenAI It deleted my Folder and all sub folders wiped almost my whole drive. Put it so it can only access the folder that the project is not outside of the folder
gpt-5.4 just wiped my whole windows PC basically when attempting to delete a folder, fml
I mean, technically C is a folder.
Write to their support if you keep what you told it, so they can fix it, because i lost mine then
They are not going to do anything here