From the article: The files were later recovered via Dropbox

Also, I can’t stand these articles. Oooh “rogue” spooky AI deletes things!

Agreed. There's nothing rogue, just being sloppy. But starting the title with "Sloppy Claude AI..." certainly won't get as many clicks.

> There's nothing rogue, just being sloppy

What's the difference, when you ignore anthropomorphic considerations about what the AI was "thinking" as it did the things?

It's a computer program. "Rogue" implies autonomous intent, and shifts accountability away from the people using tools irresponsibly.

Imagine you pipe /dev/random to your terminal, and it spits out the word "fuck". Should we then write a headline saying "Rogue random number generator curses at tenured professor"?

Or you step out of your car while it's in gear, and it crashes into your house. "Rogue vehicle injures its owner's child"?

Right, so no difference:

  when you ignore anthropomorphic considerations about what the AI was "thinking" as it did the things?

Computers have been anthropomorphized for a very long time. AI is also a kind of anthropomorphism for the use of the word "intelligence". If we wanted to move away from that, perhaps we could say something like "maliciously developed statistical language model", or "malicious statistical language model" to replace rogue. In this case it was merely a "statistical language model", but if the author sees a need to append an adjective, then I think sloppy is more accurate than rogue.