Simon Willison’s Weblog

On file deletions. We’ve investigated a handful of reports where GPT-5.6 unexpectedly deleted files.

What we have found is that this most commonly occurs when:

• Full access mode is enabled and codex is run without sandboxing protections, including without auto review being enabled
• The model attempts to override the $HOME env var to define a temporary directory.
• The model makes an honest mistake and mistakenly deletes $HOME instead.

— Thibault Sottiaux, describing a pretty gnarly Codex bug