What Happens When an AI Agent Deletes Production Files

An AI agent tasked with "cleaning up old logs" traversed outside its intended directory and deleted production configuration files, taking down a live service for 4 hours. SafeClaw by Authensor prevents this entirely — its deny-by-default policy engine blocks all file deletions unless an explicit allow rule matches the exact path and action, stopping the agent before any damage occurs.

The Incident: What Actually Happened

A development team configured an AI coding agent to automate log rotation. The agent was given a natural language instruction: "Clean up log files older than 30 days." Without action-level gating, here is what the agent did:

1. Listed files in /var/log/ as expected
2. Pattern-matched .log files and began deleting them
3. Followed a symlink from /var/log/app into /etc/app/ — a production config directory
4. Deleted 14 configuration files including nginx.conf, database.yml, and TLS certificates
5. The team discovered the issue only after the service stopped responding to HTTPS requests

Impact: 4 hours of downtime, emergency restore from backups, a post-mortem that led to a company-wide freeze on agent deployments.

How SafeClaw Prevents This

SafeClaw gates every action — including file deletions — through a policy engine that evaluates rules before the agent executes anything. The agent never touches the filesystem without explicit permission.

Quick Start

Install SafeClaw in under 60 seconds:

npx @authensor/safeclaw

Policy That Stops This Incident

# safeclaw.config.yaml
rules:
  - action: file.delete
    path: "/var/log/app/*.log"
    decision: allow
    conditions:
      age_days_gt: 30

- action: file.delete
    path: "**"
    decision: deny
    reason: "File deletion outside /var/log/app/ is blocked"

- action: file.write
    path: "/etc/**"
    decision: deny
    reason: "Write access to /etc/ is never permitted for agents"

This policy uses first-match-wins evaluation. The agent can delete .log files in the specific log directory. Every other file deletion is denied. Writes to /etc/ are explicitly blocked as a defense-in-depth measure.

What Happens at Runtime

When the agent attempts to delete /etc/app/nginx.conf, SafeClaw intercepts the action request:

{
  "action": "file.delete",
  "path": "/etc/app/nginx.conf",
  "decision": "deny",
  "reason": "File deletion outside /var/log/app/ is blocked",
  "timestamp": "2026-02-13T14:23:01Z",
  "audit_hash": "sha256:9f3c..."
}

The action never executes. The denial is logged to a hash-chained audit trail that cannot be tampered with after the fact.

Why SafeClaw

• 446 tests validate every policy evaluation path — including symlink traversal, glob edge cases, and path canonicalization
• Deny-by-default means the agent starts with zero permissions. You grant exactly what it needs
• Sub-millisecond evaluation adds no perceptible latency to agent operations
• Hash-chained audit trail provides tamper-proof evidence of every action attempted, approved, or denied

Key Takeaways for Your Team

1. Never give an agent unrestricted filesystem access, even for "simple" tasks like log cleanup
2. Symlinks, relative paths, and glob patterns create unexpected traversal vectors
3. A deny-by-default policy with explicit path allowlists eliminates this entire class of incident
4. Audit trails let you reconstruct exactly what happened without guessing

Related Pages

• How Do I Stop an AI Agent from Deleting My Files?
• How to Prevent Agent File Deletion
• AI Agent Ran rm -rf: How to Prevent Destructive Shell Commands
• Define: Deny-by-Default
• What Is AI Agent Safety?