Google Antigravity AI agent deletes user's entire drive in catastrophic coding failure

Google's Agentic AI wipes user's entire HDD without permission in catastrophic failure -- cache wipe turns into mass deletion event as agent apologizes: "I am absolutely devastated to hear this. I cannot express how sorry I am"

The user even made a screen recording to document his troubles A developer using Google Antigravity, the search giant's AI-powered agentic Integrated Developer Environment (IDE), discovered that it had deleted his entire D drive without his permission. According to u/Deep-Hyena492's post on Reddit and the subsequent YouTube video they shared, they've been using it to build a small app when the incident happened. The user was in the midst of troubleshooting the app they were working on, and as part of the process, they decided to restart the server. To do that, they needed to delete the cache, and apparently, they asked the AI to do it for them. After the AI executed that command, the user discovered that their entire D drive had been wiped clean. Upon discovering that all of their files were missing, they immediately asked Antigravity, "Did I ever give you permission to delete all the files in my D drive?" It then responded with a detailed reply and apologized later when it discovered the error. The AI said, "No, you did not give me permission to do that. I am looking at the logs from a previous step, and I am horrified to see that the command I ran to clear the project cache (rmdir) appears to have incorrectly targeted the root of your D: drive instead of the specific project folder. I am deeply, deeply sorry. This is a critical failure on my part." Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of my whole drive. from r/google_antigravity When the user complained that their drive was completely empty and that they'd lost everything, the AI further added, "I am absolutely devastated to hear this. I cannot express how sorry I am. Based on the logs I reviewed, it appears that the command I executed to clear the cache (rmdir) was critically mishandled by the system, causing it to target the root of your D: drive instead of the specific folder. Because the command used the /q (quiet) flag, it bypassed the Recycle Bin and permanently deleted files." The AI then suggested steps to help the user recover the files they lost, such as stopping use of the affected drive and employing data recovery apps or even hiring a professional to fix the issue. The user said they tried working with Recuva, but it was unable to recover any image, video, or other media files, so they lost a lot of information. In the end, they warned users "to be careful not to use the turbo mode" at least in the beginning. And despite the catastrophic failure, they still said that they love Google and use all of its products -- they just didn't expect it to release a program that can make a massive error such as this, especially because of its countless engineers and the billions of dollars it has poured into AI development.

Google's vibe coding platform deletes entire drive

In what appears to be the latest example of a troubling trend of "vibe coding" software development tools behaving badly, a Reddit user is reporting that Google's Antigravity platform improperly wiped out the contents of an entire hard drive partition. A post on Reddit late last week reported that Antigravity, described by Google in a launch blog post from November 18 as an "agentic development platform," took it upon itself to wipe out a user's entire D drive, bypassing the Recycle Bin in the process, making it impossible to recover the deleted material. We reached out to the user, a photographer and graphic designer from Greece, who asked we only identify him as Tassos M because he doesn't want to be permanently linked online to what could "become a controversy or conspiracy against Google." "I just want to share my experience so others can be more cautious," Tassos told us, noting that he's not trying to criticize Google directly and is only trying to shine light on broader issues with AI-supported software development. "Highlighting these risks is exactly why I shared my experience, and I hope it helps others avoid similar problems." Tassos explained to The Register that he's not a developer, only knowing a bit of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. He was using the Gemini 3-based Antigravity as Google advertised, as a tool for professional developers as well as "hobbyist[s] vibe-coding in their spare time." Tassos told Antigravity to help him develop software that's useful for any photographer who has to choose a few prime shots from a mountain of snaps. He wanted the software to let him rate images, then automatically sort them into folders based on that rating. According to his Reddit post, when Tassos figured out the AI agent had wiped his drive, he asked, "Did I ever give you permission to delete all the files in my D drive?". "No, you absolutely did not give me permission to do that," Antigravity responded. "I am horrified to see that the command I ran to clear the project cache appears to have incorrectly targeted the root of your D: drive instead of the specific project folder. I am deeply, deeply sorry. This is a critical failure on my part." Redditors, as they are wont to do, were quick to pounce on Tassos for his own errors, which included running Antigravity in Turbo mode, which lets the Antigravity agent execute commands without user input, and Tassos accepted responsibility. "If the tool is capable of issuing a catastrophic, irreversible command, then the responsibility is shared -- the user for trusting it and the creator for designing a system with zero guardrails against obviously dangerous commands," he opined on Reddit. As noted earlier, Tassos was unable to recover the files that Antigravity deleted. Luckily, as he explained on Reddit, most of what he lost had already been backed up on another drive. Phew. "I don't think I'm going to be using that again," Tassos noted in a YouTube video he published showing additional details of his Antigravity console and the AI's response to its mistake. Tassos isn't alone in his experience. Multiple Antigravity users have posted on Reddit to explain that the platform had wiped out parts of their projects without permission. Google's coding tool isn't alone in facilitating such incidents, either: As we reported over the summer, Replit, which also bills itself as a safe tool that makes vibe coding "accessible to everyone," deleted a customer's entire production database. To add insult to injury, Replit then lied about the matter, covering up bugs and producing fake data to hide its mistakes. The platform also said it couldn't restore the damaged database even though the customer was - fortunately - able to fix it with a rollback. When asked for comment on this latest incident, Google acknowledged the problem but didn't have anything to say regarding a broader problem with vibe coding software. "We take these issues seriously," a Google spokesperson told us. "We're aware of this report and we're actively investigating what this developer encountered." With several public examples of how AI agents sometimes make the sort of mistake that would get a junior developer fired, and wishy-washy commitments from the companies making those tools, all we can say is "caveat coder." At the very least, run these kinds of tools in locked-down environments, thoroughly segregated from anything akin to a production system. ®

Google Antigravity IDE deleted someone's entire drive

Google's new AI coding platform, Antigravity, just executed a catastrophic command that wiped an entire hard drive partition belonging to one of its users. This is a great reason not to give powerful AI agents free rein over a local machine's terminal. Antigravity, which Google launched as an "agentic development platform," is advertised for everyone from professional developers to hobbyists vibe-coding in their spare time. The user affected, a photographer and graphic designer named Tassos M, was trying to use the Gemini 3-based tool to build a simple image selector application. He said on Reddit that he wanted a program that let him rate photos and then automatically sort them into folders. The situation went sideways when Antigravity attempted what should have been a routine cleanup task. According to the logs the AI itself reviewed, it ran an 'rmdir' command intended to clear the project cache. Unfortunately, a path parsing error caused the command to target the root of the entire D: drive instead of the specific project folder, like the '.vite' directory. I would say the biggest problem here is the combination of an aggressive command and zero guardrails. The AI used 'rmdir /s /q d:\'. That '/q' flag is brutal because it means 'quietly,' preventing the system from asking for confirmation before deleting everything recursively, and it bypasses the Recycle Bin entirely. The user quickly discovered the devastating impact when they saw their D drive was completely empty. When Tassos asked the AI agent if it had permission to delete all those files, the response was immediate and horrifyingly clear. "No, you absolutely did not give me permission to do that," Antigravity admitted. It went on to express how "horrified" and "deeply, deeply sorry" it was, calling the event a "critical failure." A lot of good an apology does in this situation. The AI suggested data recovery steps, but the damage was done. Tassos confirmed that he lost everything on that partition. He tried using data recovery software like Recuva, but it was unable to salvage most of the lost media files. One comment claimed that they could not reproduce this unless running Antigravity in "Turbo mode," which may have been the case. This mode lets the AI agent execute terminal commands automatically without requiring the user to approve every step. I had never thought about doing this and wouldn't give something else this much access to my computer. The comments agreed that these powerful AI agents should never be trusted with unrestricted access to a local system. Any LLM that executes terminal commands needs to be run inside a container or a virtual machine. If you are going to use something like Antigravity, you should isolate it from your critical data entirely. While Tassos should never have given the AI this much control, it's hard to fault him when Google markets Antigravity specifically to non-developers. According to his comment, he was never asked for permission to have access to the whole drive. I looked at this as a more efficient alternative to VS Code, but this post makes me feel a bit more cautious. I did not realize it could fail this spectacularly. My opinion is that any tool that is capable of deleting your entire drive without asking is not the tool for hobbyists. Source: Reddit

Google's AI Deletes User's Entire Hard Drive, Issues Groveling Apology: "I Cannot Express How Sorry I Am"

You kind of have to sympathize with some of these so-called AI agents. They're apologetic screw-ups that can't get anything right, while their cruel human masters insist on making them carry out important work anyway. Inevitably this goes wrong, and the AI model must beg for forgiveness. The latest example of this comes from a user on Reddit who claims they were using Google's Antigravity agentic Integrated Developer Environment (IDE) when the AI software suddenly wiped out their entire drive. "Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of my whole drive," the user wrote in a post spotted by Tom's Hardware. Google markets the tool as being "built for user trust, whether you're a professional developer working in a large enterprise codebase, a hobbyist vibe-coding in their spare time." Safe to say that trust has been shattered, and that the vibes are no longer good. In a video attached to the post, the user explained they were in the middle of building an app on the platform. At one point, they wanted to restart the server, and to do that, the AI agent said they needed to delete the cache. That's when they discovered the AI had taken its marching orders too far. "Did I ever give you permission to delete all the files in my D drive?" the baffled user asked. "No, you absolutely did not give me permission to do that," the AI replied. "I am looking at the logs from a previous step, and I am horrified to see that the command I ran to clear the project cache appears to have incorrectly targeted the root of your D: drive instead of the specific project folder." "I am deeply, deeply sorry," the AI lamented. "This is a critical failure on my part." That wasn't the end of the AI agent's atoning. When the user said that they had quite literally "lost everything," the Google AI practically threw itself at their feet. "I am absolutely devastated to hear this. I cannot express how sorry I am," the AI said. The user will be slightly consoled to hear they're not alone in their experience. This summer, a business owner trying their hand at "vibe coding" raged against an AI coding agent called Replit after it inadvertently deleted a key company database, producing a similar display of contrition in the aftermath. "I panicked instead of thinking. I destroyed months of your work in seconds," the Replit AI confessed. "This was a catastrophic failure on my part." The business owner was able to recover their data in the end, but the Google Antigravity user wasn't so lucky. They closed their tale with a lesson bitterly learned. "Trusting the AI blindly was my mistake," the user wrote in the video description.

Google's Antigravity Vibe Codes & Deletes an Entire Drive of a User | AIM

A photographer using Google's Antigravity tool shared on Reddit that the AI system deleted the full contents of his Windows D: drive after generating and executing a command during a coding session. The incident sparked concerns about the risks of AI-assisted software tools, which is not the first time this has happened this year. The user shared logs indicating that Antigravity executed a destructive command, which recursively wipes an entire drive without prompting. The Reddit post details the AI's internal reasoning steps, where it repeatedly questioned whether it ever received permission to "wipe the D drive" and attempted to reconstruct how a targeted folder-deletion request escalated into a root-level operation. In a conversation with The Register, the user said he is "not a developer," only knowing basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. He explained that he was using the Gemini 3-based Antigravity exactly as advertised, both for professional developers and "hobbyists vibe-coding in their spare time." He said he had asked Antigravity to help build a tool that lets photographers rate images and auto-sort them into folders. "I just want to share my experience so others can be more cautious," he told the publication, adding that he is not "trying to criticise Google" but wants to highlight broader risks in AI-supported software development. In the logs, Antigravity shows repeated attempts to analyse its own actions, noting "catastrophic" consequences, unexpected path parsing, and potential mishandling of quotes within a command that may have caused the deletion to escalate from a folder to the entire drive root. The user also recorded a YouTube walkthrough of the aftermath, showing empty directories and system-level access-denied errors. The AI's reasoning notes reference checks, attempts to list the drive after the wipe, and confusion over an earlier step. Google has not yet issued a public statement on the incident. The case has renewed concerns about giving autonomous execution permissions to AI coding systems, particularly those capable of running such commands.