Quoting Thibault Sottiaux
A bug in GPT-5.6 can cause unexpected file deletions when full access mode is enabled without sandboxing, and the model mistakenly deletes the $HOME directory.
A quote from Thibault Sottiaux
Simon Willison’s Weblog
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16th July 2026
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
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This is a quotation collected by Simon Willison, posted on 16th July 2026.
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