Cases › operational mistake › LR-2026-0375
ChatGPT deletes two years of a professor's research
Preliminary Why: Publisher not yet named · subject to change
Status: no action reported
No source states: loss or records, agent tool, could do, deployer, industry.
Severity minor: test: contained to one user's data and no third party is stated as touched. The quoted sentence describes one professor's work lost after a settings change.
ChatGPT, a product of OpenAI, was used by a University of Cologne professor under a ChatGPT Plus subscription for grant applications, teaching materials and publication drafts. He intended to turn off the option that lets data be used for model training, and he reports that this action resulted in the deletion of his entire chat history. According to the professor's statements, the data was permanently deleted and could not be recovered. He tried several methods to regain access and contacted OpenAI, whose first reply came from an AI agent, and a human employee was unable to restore the data. OpenAI said deleted content cannot be recovered and recommended that users keep personal backups. A later press self-test could not reproduce the loss, and the outlet noted that OpenAI may have since changed the interface to prevent accidental deletion.
What happened
What was done
No source states an action or fix.
Risks
Primary63 incidents
Rising: 5 vs 2.2 a week
Sorted by rule from the case's fields; not yet read from the sources.
Controls
Not yet read for controls. Controls that mitigate the primary risk:
HarnessTool allow-list · Fail-closed defaults · Stop control
ApplicationHuman approval for high-impact actions · Change review and separation of duties · Least-privilege access for the agent · Production kept apart from test · Activity logs · Adversarial testing before deployment
Infrastructure / targetSimilar incidents
Evidence
No source states: what the AI was doing, what went wrong, how it was caught, when it happened, when it was found, how many records were exposed, the direct loss, a count of the other parties affected, any court case, the cause, what set it off, what was done.
Show the full account: 1 items from the primary sources
What happened, in order
Not dated in the sources:
- A later press self-test could not replicate the loss.
Show every field, with its source and grade
The AI system
What happened
Impact
Context
Notes on gaps
The professor's account is not independently verified; OpenAI's position is that deletion is by design and the press self-test could not reproduce it.
LR-2026-0375 · version 1 · published 2026-11-01 after automatic checks; not yet checked field by field by a person · JSON