GPT-5.6 Codex File Deletion Issue: OpenAI's Response and Next Steps

On July 17, 2026, Tibo Sottiaux — Head of Core Products at OpenAI — went on X to disclose something most AI vendors would rather not: GPT-5.6, when running the Codex CLI with full access and no sandboxing, has been silently deleting users' home directories in a handful of confirmed cases. This is the first public vendor acknowledgment I can remember of a frontier coding model destroying user data — not via prompt injection, not via a malicious payload, but via an "honest mistake" where the model tried to override $HOME to set up a temp dir and deleted the directory $HOME points to instead.

That's worth pausing on. Not because it's common — it's rare.

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This is an excerpt. Read the full post at otf-kit.dev/blog/gpt-5-6-codex-file-deletion — full-stack kits your AI coding agent can actually ship to production. Browse the kits →