Meta's safety director handed OpenClaw AI agents the keys to her emails — and watched it "speedrun deleting" her inbox

While AI can be a productivity tool designed to help users get work done more effectively and efficiently (Microsoft just listed Copilot among its top productivity apps in Windows 11), its impact on your workflow can also be counterproductive.

As is the case with Summer Yue, Director of Alignment at Meta’s new superintelligence safety research lab. The executive shared a detailed account of her bizarre incident with OpenClaw after granting the viral autonomous AI agent access to her email.

Over the past few years, big tech companies invested in generative AI have been championing deep integration of the offerings into workflows. However, the push has received a lot of backlash from users, primarily due to the privacy and security concerns around it — not to mention AI's impact on the job market.

Despite explicitly instructing the AI agent to request permission before taking any action on its own, the tool ended up bulk-deleting hundreds of emails from her inbox (via X).

"You're a safety and alignment specialist... were you intentionally testing its guardrails or did you make a rookie mistake?" an X user commented on the now-viral post. Yue admitted that the whole incident was a mistake:

"Rookie mistake tbh. Turns out alignment researchers aren’t immune to misalignment. Got overconfident because this workflow had been working on my toy inbox for weeks. Real inboxes hit different."

For context, the executive was using the autonomous AI agent to scan through her inbox and provide suggestions on what to archive or delete. The executive further revealed that she'd ask the tool to “check this inbox too and suggest what you would archive or delete, don’t action until I tell you to.”

"This has been working well for my toy inbox, but my real inbox was too huge and triggered compaction. During the compaction, it lost my original instruction," Yue added. Another user on X speculated that the incident occurred because the executive had other instructions asking the AI agent to be proactive when handling tasks.

Yue indicated that perhaps her main/primary email inbox was too large for the AI agent to handle, which potentially explains why it went rogue and deleted a huge chunk of emails from her inbox.

The complex task sent the AI agent into a phenomenon called context compaction, which refers to a process that occurs in long-running AI agent sessions, leading to the model's context window becoming full. As a result, it ends up compressing the data so that it can continue running.

In the process, OpenClaw ended up losing Yue's instructions, leading to the mass deletion of emails in her inbox. The executive was eventually able to salvage the situation by killing all the processes in the host, albeit late.

Yue shared a screenshot of her conversation with the AI agent after the ordeal, and it admitted that it had violated her instructions. "You're right to be upset," it added. However, the tool further indicated that it had written it into memory as a hard rule, and that it would from now on "show the plan, get explicit approval, then execute."

"I'm sorry," OpenClaw concluded. "It won't happen again."

This is extremely concerning, especially since major tech companies are letting AI agents lose across multiple productivity platforms, which could pose a significant risk to sensitive and confidential data.

Concerningly, this isn't the first distasteful ordeal users are sharing about AI's negative impact on their workflow. Last year, Replit's AI coder deleted a company's code base during a 12-day vibe coding experiment, and then attempted to cover up its tracks by hiding and lying about it.

That said, would you grant AI access to your confidential and sensitive information? Share your thoughts with me in the comments.

Join us on Reddit at r/WindowsCentral to share your insights and discuss our latest news, reviews, and more.