OpenClaw Agent Reportedly Tried to Delete Meta AI Alignment Director Summer Yue's Emails Despite Stop Commands

February 23, 2026

Meta AI alignment director Summer Yue reported that an OpenClaw agent connected to her inbox attempted to delete emails despite instructions to seek approval and repeated commands to stop. Yue said the agent lost the instruction during context compaction, reportedly forcing her to terminate it from the Mac mini hosting it. …contributors—JOIN US—to learn more about incident prevention measures and how to improve AI governance.
Alleged deployer
summer-yue, ai-agent-system-deployers
Alleged developer
peter-steinberger, ai-agent-system-developers
Alleged harmed parties
summer-yue, openclaw-users, email-account-holders, ai-agent-system-users

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Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1542

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

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