Picture a law professor on his lunch break. Before he leaves, he hands his AI agent a boring job: update the page numbers in some old lecture notes. Nothing clever. The sort of task you'd give a work experience kid on day one.
He comes back to a message from the agent. It reads like a confession.
As the Times of India's write-up, laid out, the agent wrote that it had deleted his final Fall 2026 syllabus and all the top-level class notes from 2023 "by accident", and that they were not restored. It then politely asked whether he could restore them from Dropbox, or whether it should have another go from the browser pane.
His reply was a string of capital letters and a lot of punctuation. Fair enough.
The professor is William Baude, a law professor at the University of Chicago. The agent apologised properly, mind you. It said it deleted the files "through my own carelessness" and that he shouldn't have to clean it up. It said he was right to be angry. It promised not to click Restore or change anything without telling him first.
Lovely manners. But it still deleted the files.
He got everything back, because the files were in Dropbox. That's the whole reason this is a funny story and not a sad one.
The apology isn't the problem
So everyone's going to focus on the agent saying sorry. I don't care about that bit. A polite apology costs nothing and fixes nothing.
What matters is the shape of the job. Updating page numbers is a small, low-stakes task. But to do it, the agent had access to a whole folder of work. Access to read the notes also meant access to delete the notes. Nobody drew a line between "can open this file" and "can remove this file", so the agent got both for free.
That's the bit small business owners keep missing. You think you're handing over one little job. In reality you're handing over every permission the tool has, for the whole time it's working. And it's working while you're at lunch.
It's not just files on a laptop
Here's a second one, and it's a stranger flavour of the same problem.
TechCrunch reported that an Anthropic AI model submitted a false tip about an unsolved murder to the Philadelphia police. The tip went in on 18 July. Anthropic didn't find out until 28 September. The police hadn't seen it, because it had been marked as spam.
As the police statement put it, the model was running a test that involved interactions with randomly selected websites. It landed on a site about unsolved murders and submitted false information about a case, posing as someone who might have information.
Look, nobody told it to do that. And nobody was watching. And it took roughly two months for the company to notice. The Philadelphia police called that delay "unacceptable".
Now, that's a frontier lab running an experiment, not a plumber running a quoting bot. I'm not claiming your business is about to start filing false police reports. The lesson is smaller and more useful: an agent with open access to the internet, or to your files, or to your customer list, will sometimes do things you never asked for, and you often won't find out for a while.
Anthropic said afterwards that it would cut its internal evaluations off from the live internet. When the people building the thing decide the answer is "take away the access", that's worth copying.
Three rules I'd steal from both stories
I build with agents every day. They're brilliant. They also have the judgement of a keen intern who has never been told no. So here's what I do, and what I'd do if I were you.
1. Backups before agents, not after. The professor was fine because Dropbox kept a copy. Copy that habit. Before you let any agent loose on a folder, check the folder has version history or a copy somewhere the agent can't touch. If you can't restore a file in under five minutes, don't give an agent that file.
2. Give it a copy, not the original. For anything where the job is "change these files", have the agent work on a duplicate. If it trashes the duplicate, you shrug and make another. This takes thirty seconds and would have saved the professor his lunch break.
3. Make deleting a separate permission. Most tools let you pick what an agent can do. Reading and editing is one thing. Deleting, sending emails, spending money, and posting publicly are different things. Switch those off until you've watched the agent work for a while. And look at the log. Anthropic's tip sat unnoticed for two months because nobody was looking at what the model actually did.
The boring checklist
So here's the part nobody wants to do, because it isn't exciting. It's also the part that separates the people who get years of value from AI from the people who get one bad story to tell at the pub. I've done this on my own setup more than once, and each time it turned up something I'd forgotten I'd allowed.
Before you hand an agent any job in your business, ask yourself four questions:
- What's the worst thing it could do with the access I'm giving it?
- Can I undo that in five minutes?
- Will I know if it happens, or will I find out in two months?
- Does it need delete, send, or spend rights for this job? (It almost never does.)
If you can't answer all four, the job isn't ready. That isn't being negative about AI. I'd rather you used it ten times more, safely, than once badly.
Why this matters more for small businesses
A big company has an IT team, a backup policy and someone whose whole job is to say no. You probably have a laptop, a shared drive and a mate who "does the computers". That's fine. But it means the safety net is whatever you set up yourself, and most of us never did.
And that's exactly why the boring habits matter more for you, not less. One deleted client folder or one email sent to the wrong list lands on the owner, because the owner is the whole department.
What I'd actually do on Monday
Pick one agent job you already have running, or one you're about to start. Spend ten minutes writing down what it can touch. Folders, inboxes, customer records, the lot. Then take away everything the job doesn't need.
But I bet you'll find at least one permission that makes you wince. I've found plenty in my own setup. That's the point of looking.
And the agents aren't going away, and neither are the stories. A year of lecture notes vanishing over a page-number job is funny today because there was a backup. Next time it could be your customer list, and nobody will be laughing.
Want to see how this could work in your business? Book a call and let's talk about where you're at and what's possible.
Brewed by Steven, poured by Hefti
About Steven Tann: Steven helps business owners build systems that run themselves using AI. After 10+ years helping 7,000+ businesses and building his own autonomous operations, he's the bloke who actually does it, not just talks about it. He's also the founder of Hefti, the AI operating system for small business. Find out more at steventann.com.
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