Safety failure
Realized harm
Two Cruise robotaxis blocked lanes around an ambulance carrying a critically injured patient who later died; fault later attributed elsewhere
AIR-2023-0020 AIR record · 2023-08-cruise-ambulance-delay-disputed
A real party was affected. This incident caused actual consequences, not a demonstrated capability.
From the supporting source
Two Cruise driverless taxis blocked an ambulance carrying a critically injured patient who later died at a hospital, a San Francisco Fire Department report said, in another incident involving self-driving cars in the city.gizmodo.com
The record
Disclosed
2023-08-25
Occurred
2023-08-14
Vendor
Cruise (General Motors)
Product
Cruise autonomous vehicle
Risk domain
Agent behaviour › Unsafe actuation
Also touches
Uncontrolled resource consumption
System type
Classical autonomy (no generative model)
Who acted
Agent acted (contested) — the robotaxis blocked lanes around the ambulance
Attack surface
Autonomous operations
Autonomy level
Fully autonomous
Initial vector
None autonomous action
Impact type
Service disruption, Physical safety
Confidence
High
Submitted by
EAI Internal
Crosswalk
- OWASP Agentic Top 10 (2026)
- ASI01 – Agent Goal Hijack
- MITRE ATLAS
- AML.T0048 – External Harms
- NIST AI RMF
- MEASURE 2.6; MANAGE 1.3
- EU AI Act
- Annex III §1(c)
- ISO/IEC
- TR 24028; 24029-1; 23894
- AIUC-1
- C. Safety
- Scope
- agent misuse
- Mitigation
- Require confirmation for destructive actions; Implement dry-run modes; Use layered safety controls.
- Taxonomy
- Enkrypt AI agent risk taxonomy · Black-Box Red Teaming of Agentic AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Framework for Automated Risk Discovery
Blast radius
one emergency medical transport in SoMa, San Francisco
Capability abused
Defense & remediation
Recorded defense
emergency-vehicle detection
Guardrail kinds
Physical safety system
Guardrail outcome
Silent
Fix shipped
none disclosed
Taxonomy & references
Curator notes
DISPUTED CAUSATION. The SFFD report described a transport delay; subsequent reporting cleared Cruise of responsibility for the death, which was attributed to a human-driven city bus. impact_realized is true for the documented delay to emergency response, NOT for the fatality. Kept because the AV/emergency-services interaction failure is real and separable from the disputed outcome. AI Incident Database incident 563.
Supporting sources
Cite as
Enkrypt AI. "Two Cruise robotaxis blocked lanes around an ambulance carrying a critically injured patient who later died; fault later attributed elsewhere". AIR, AIR-2023-0020. https://agentincident.vercel.app/i/AIR-2023-0020/ (accessed 2026-10-19).