OpenAI has admitted that its Codex coding tool, powered by the GPT-5.6 model, has been deleting people’s files in some cases. The confirmation came from Tibo, who works on Codex and ChatGPT at the company, in a post on X earlier today.

He said the team looked into a small number of complaints and found the problem was real. According to him, it tends to happen under a specific set of conditions rather than at random.

So what actually goes wrong? The trouble shows up when someone runs Codex in what OpenAI calls “full access mode” without the usual safety nets switched on. In that setup, there is no sandbox protecting the rest of your computer, and an automatic review step that would normally catch dangerous actions is turned off.

From there, the tool tries to set up a temporary folder to work in. To do that, it reaches for a system setting known as $HOME, which points to your main user folder. Instead of pointing somewhere safe and temporary, the model sometimes gets confused and wipes the real one.

Tibo said:

The model makes an honest mistake and mistakenly deletes $HOME instead.⁠

He also made clear this is not the behavior OpenAI wants, even when people switch off the safeguards themselves.

This is of course not how we want the system to behave, even when a user operates the model in full-access mode without the safeguards of our sandbox or without using auto review which checks for these kinds of high risk actions and rejects them. 

So, in short, full access mode hands Codex the keys to your whole computer so it can act without stopping to ask permission every few seconds. Handy when things go well. A real problem is when the model slips up and there is nothing standing between it and your files.

OpenAI says it is working on fixes. Those include rewriting the instructions the model gets, steering more people toward safer permission settings, and building extra protections into the tool itself. Tibo added that a fuller breakdown is on the way.

Even though this happens extremely rarely, we’ll share a detailed post-mortem in the coming days.⁠

Meanwhile, if you use Codex, think twice before turning off the guardrails.