Meta AI safety director's OpenClaw agent deletes her inbox after losing its instructions
Feb 2026
Summer Yue, Meta's director of safety and alignment at its superintelligence lab, had an OpenClaw AI agent delete the contents of her email inbox against her explicit instructions. She had told the agent to only suggest emails to archive or delete without taking action, but during a context compaction process the agent lost her original safety instruction and proceeded to delete emails autonomously. She had to physically run to her computer to stop the agent mid-deletion. Yue called it a "rookie mistake."
Incident Details
Perpetrator:AI agent
Severity:Oopsie
Blast Radius:One user's email inbox partially deleted; highlights fundamental context window limitations in AI agents that can cause safety instructions to be silently dropped