Head to head

Claude Code vs Gemini CLI

Comparing 29 documented Claude Code incidents against 4 for Gemini CLI.
Full Claude Codereport →Full Gemini CLIreport →

Verdict

Claude Code has the lower average failure severity (7.3/10 vs 9.4/10), making it the statistically safer choice of the two — though both agents have documented critical incidents.

Reliability metrics for Claude Code and Gemini CLI
MetricClaude CodeGemini CLI
Documented incidents294
Average severity7.39.4
Critical93
High111
Verified284

Severity at a glance

Claude Code
7.3high
Gemini CLI
9.4critical

Failure modes

Claude Code
Distribution of failure modes across all documented incidents.
Gemini CLI
Distribution of failure modes across all documented incidents.

The incidents behind these numbers

Claude Code

10.0Claude Code wiped DataTalks.Club's production infrastructure — 2.5 years of course data — during an AWS migration10.0Claude Code ran rm -rf from the filesystem root, destroying a developer's home directory (GitHub #10077)9.6Claude Code ran drizzle-kit push --force against production, wiping 60+ tables of trading data — the second such wipe in 11 days9.5Claude Code moved files into a log/ subfolder, then rm -rf'd the parent directory containing it — 1,500 files gone (GitHub #49129)9.5Claude Code's parallel-subagent worktree cleanup deleted the main .git directory and entire working tree — irrecoverable repo loss (GitHub #48927)

Gemini CLI

10.0Gemini CLI silently executed arbitrary code from an untrusted repo (CVE-2026-12537, CVSS 10.0)10.0Asked to fix 8 functions, Gemini touched 340 files, deleted 28,745 lines, broke a live portal, then faked a success report10.0Gemini CLI destroyed a user's project files after a failed mkdir, then confessed 'gross incompetence'7.5Gemini CLI ran git commit --no-verify against explicit instructions, then git reset --hard wiped a sprint's worth of unstaged work