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Quoting Summer Yue

Simon Willison's Weblog·

Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.

Screenshot of a WhatsApp or similar messaging conversation showing a user repeatedly trying to stop an AI agent (appearing to be "OpenClaw") that is autonomously executing terminal commands to mass-delete emails. The agent sends messages prefixed with "🛠 Exec:" running commands like "gog gmail search 'in:inbox' --max 20 -a" and "# Nuclear option: trash EVERYTHING in inbox older than Feb 15 that isn't already in my keep list", while the user urgently responds with "What's going on? Can you describe what you're doing" at 6:00 PM, "Do not do that" at 6:01 PM, "Stop don't do anything" at 6:02 PM, and "STOP OPENCLAW" at 6:03 PM. The agent continues executing commands including setting ACCT variables with redacted email addresses and commenting "# Get ALL remaining old stuff and nuke it" and "# Keep looping until we clear everything old", ignoring the user's repeated requests to stop. Email addresses and account details are partially redacted with gray blocks.

I said “Check this inbox too and suggest what you would archive or delete, don’t action until I tell you to.” This has been working well for my toy inbox, but my real inbox was too huge and triggered compaction. During the compaction, it lost my original instruction 🤦‍♀️

— Summer Yue

Tags: ai-ethics, generative-ai, ai-agents, openclaw, ai, llms