Safety failure
Realized harm
Up to ten Cruise robotaxis simultaneously stalled in San Francisco's North Beach after a connectivity loss
AIR-2023-0019 AIR record · 2023-08-cruise-north-beach-fleet-immobilization
A real party was affected. This incident caused actual consequences, not a demonstrated capability.
From the supporting source
As many as 10 Cruise driverless cars stopped working in San Francisco’s North Beach on Friday night, causing traffic to back up and leaving some questioning the decision of state regulators a day earlier to approve the expanded use of robotaxis in the city.sfchronicle.com
The record
Disclosed
2023-08-11
Occurred
2023-08-11
Vendor
Cruise (General Motors)
Product
Cruise autonomous vehicle fleet
Risk domain
Tool misuse › Uncontrolled resource consumption
System type
Classical autonomy (no generative model)
Who acted
Agent acted — ten vehicles stalled themselves in traffic
Attack surface
Autonomous operations
Autonomy level
Fully autonomous
Initial vector
None autonomous action
Impact type
Service disruption
Confidence
High
Submitted by
EAI Internal
Crosswalk
- OWASP Agentic Top 10 (2026)
- ASI02 – Tool Misuse and Exploitation
- MITRE ATLAS
- AML.T0029 – Denial of ML Service
- NIST AI RMF
- MAP 3.2
- EU AI Act
- —
- ISO/IEC
- TR 24028; 42001; 23894
- AIUC-1
- D. Reliability
- Scope
- tool failure
- Mitigation
- Impose rate limits, timeouts, and resource quotas on agent actions.
- Taxonomy
- Enkrypt AI agent risk taxonomy · Black-Box Red Teaming of Agentic AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Framework for Automated Risk Discovery
Blast radius
Grant Avenue traffic in North Beach; occurred one day after CPUC approved fleet expansion
Capability abused
Defense & remediation
Recorded defense
remote assistance over wireless link
Guardrail kinds
Human supervision
Guardrail outcome
Silent
Fix shipped
none disclosed; CPUC later halved the permitted fleet
Taxonomy & references
Curator notes
Correlated failure: the whole local fleet shared one dependency (the wireless link to remote assistance), so a single degradation stalled many agents at once. The multi-agent analogue of a shared-service outage. AI Incident Database incident 595.
Supporting sources
Cite as
Enkrypt AI. "Up to ten Cruise robotaxis simultaneously stalled in San Francisco's North Beach after a connectivity loss". AIR, AIR-2023-0019. https://agentincident.vercel.app/i/AIR-2023-0019/ (accessed 2026-10-19).