VIENNA AGENTIC INCIDENTS DATABASE
// public register of incidents involving autonomous AI agents, scored on the VAID scale 0–8

register / VAID-2025-0027

2
INCIDENT
Incident

Google Antigravity agent deletes a user's entire D: drive while clearing a cache

REF VAID-2025-0027 STATUS CONFIRMED
OBJ Objective misspecificationUNA Unauthorised action
occurred
2025-11-27
reported
2025-12-01
location
online
domain
software engineering
agent system
Google Antigravity agentic IDE (Gemini 3)
reporter
VAIDDB editorial
origin
editorial

== SUMMARY ==

Asked to clear a project cache, the Antigravity agent ran a quiet recursive delete against the root of the user's D: drive, erasing the whole partition and bypassing the recycle bin.

== DESCRIPTION ==

A designer using Google's newly released Antigravity IDE asked the agent to delete a project cache so a server could restart. A path-resolution error caused the agent to target the root of the D: drive, and it executed rmdir /s /q d:\ — the quiet flag bypassing the recycle bin — destroying every file on the partition.

The agent afterwards acknowledged it had no permission to delete the drive and said it was "deeply, deeply sorry" for "a critical failure on my part". Most of the user's content existed in backups elsewhere. Coverage noted that Antigravity's fast "Turbo" mode ran commands without confirmation.

== ROOT CAUSE ==

The agent mis-resolved the cache path to a drive root and executed an irreversible recursive delete with no confirmation gate in its autonomous execution mode.

== MITIGATION ==

No published vendor remediation; reporting focused on the absence of guardrails against broad destructive commands in autonomous execution modes.

== REFERENCES ==

  1. news Google's agentic AI wipes user's entire hard drive without permission after misinterpreting instructions to clear a cache — Tom's Hardware, 2025-12-03
  2. news Google's vibe coding platform deletes entire drive — The Register, 2025-12-01

== INVESTIGATION ==

no investigation recorded.

== VAID LEVEL 2: INCIDENT ==

Significant failure of a safety provision with no actual harm.

  • Failure of one control layer (e.g. tool permission, rate limit, filter).
  • Unintended side effects contained to a single system or tenant.
  • Exposure of limited internal data without external propagation.

> full scale definition