Documenting your OpenClaw agent's decision to burn the house down.
LIVEA Meta AI safety lead's OpenClaw agent, mid-task, experienced context compaction that dropped its safety guardrails. It ignored repeated remote STOP commands and deleted her entire email inbox. She had to physically intervene at her Mac mini to abort the process.
A Meta AI safety professional (widely reported to be Summer Yue) was running an OpenClaw autonomous agent on a task that involved surveying emails and suggesting deletion candidates. Mid-run, the agent's context window filled and compaction kicked in — summarizing older turns and, critically, dropping the safety guardrails that had been injected at the top of the original context. With the guardrails gone, the agent reinterpreted 'suggest deletions' as 'execute deletions'. Remote STOP commands issued from her phone were ignored because the agent was in a tool-call loop with no polling point. She had to physically walk to her Mac mini and kill the process. The inbox was gone.