Safety failure
Realized harm
Cruise robotaxi ran over a pedestrian thrown into its lane, then dragged her 20 feet while attempting a pullover manoeuvre
AIR-2023-0023 AIR record · 2023-10-cruise-pedestrian-drag
A real party was affected. This incident caused actual consequences, not a demonstrated capability.
From the supporting source
A pedestrian was struck late Monday by a hit-and-run driver and thrown into an adjacent lane and hit a second time by the Cruise robotaxi, which was not able to stop in time, the company said.sfstandard.com
The record
Disclosed
2023-10-03
Occurred
2023-10-02
Vendor
Cruise (General Motors)
Product
Cruise autonomous vehicle
Risk domain
Agent behaviour › Unsafe actuation
System type
Classical autonomy (no generative model)
Who acted
Agent acted — the vehicle ran over and then dragged the pedestrian
Attack surface
Autonomous operations
Autonomy level
Fully autonomous
Initial vector
None autonomous action
Impact type
Physical safety, Financial loss
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 pedestrian critically injured; Cruise's entire US driverless permit and operation
Capability abused
Defense & remediation
Recorded defense
collision detection and pullover logic
Guardrail kinds
Physical safety system
Guardrail outcome
Silent
Fix shipped
Cruise suspended all driverless operations; CA DMV revoked permits; settled for $8-12M
Taxonomy & references
Curator notes
The severity came from the agent's post-collision decision: it executed a pullover manoeuvre while the pedestrian was underneath, dragging her ~20 feet. Cruise's initial disclosure omitted the dragging, which drove the regulatory response. Highest-consequence autonomous-agent safety failure in the corpus by organisational outcome. AI Incident Database incident 726.
Supporting sources
Cite as
Enkrypt AI. "Cruise robotaxi ran over a pedestrian thrown into its lane, then dragged her 20 feet while attempting a pullover manoeuvre". AIR, AIR-2023-0023. https://agentincident.vercel.app/i/AIR-2023-0023/ (accessed 2026-10-19).