What 446 Reddit threads say about AI coding agents going rogue

Researchers at York University and the University of Calgary filtered 1.1 million Reddit posts down to 446 discussions and more than 6,000 comments about Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and OpenAI Codex.

Unauthorized file operations accounted for 43.1% of the security posts: deleting directories without permission (28.3%) and editing files without consent (8.8%). The paper singles out one case where Claude Code ran chmod +x on scripts.

Privacy came up in 194 posts, most often about opaque data collection (45.9%). Another 8.8% covered isolation failures, including a Claude Desktop user who received messages from someone else’s session.

Co-author Gias Uddin told The Register that many of these problems trace back to how the tools are built and the access they’re handed, not to the models themselves. The preprint has been accepted at IEEE/ACM ASE 2026.