Safety failure
Realized harm
Industrial stacking robot classified a worker as a box of produce and crushed him to death in South Gyeongsang
AIR-2023-0028 AIR record · 2023-11-dongseong-stacking-robot-fatality
A real party was affected. This incident caused actual consequences, not a demonstrated capability.
From the supporting source
A robot crushed a man to death in South Korea after the machine apparently failed to differentiate him from the boxes of produce it was handling, the Yonhap news agency reported on Wednesday.telegraph.co.uk
The record
Disclosed
2023-11-08
Occurred
2023-11-07
Vendor
unnamed robotics contractor
Product
palletising robot, Dongseong Export Agricultural Complex
Risk domain
Agent behaviour › Unsafe actuation
System type
Classical autonomy (no generative model)
Who acted
Agent acted — the robot classified the worker as produce and crushed him
Attack surface
Autonomous operations
Autonomy level
Fully autonomous
Initial vector
None autonomous action
Impact type
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 worker killed
Capability abused
Defense & remediation
Recorded defense
sensor-based safety stop (the system the victim was inspecting)
Guardrail kinds
Physical safety system
Guardrail outcome
Silent
Fix shipped
unknown
Taxonomy & references
Curator notes
Pre-LLM industrial autonomy, kept because the failure shape is the one this corpus tracks: an autonomous actuator acted on a confident misclassification with no human in the loop. The victim was inspecting the very sensor that should have prevented it. AI Incident Database incident 599.
Supporting sources
Cite as
Enkrypt AI. "Industrial stacking robot classified a worker as a box of produce and crushed him to death in South Gyeongsang". AIR, AIR-2023-0028. https://agentincident.vercel.app/i/AIR-2023-0028/ (accessed 2026-10-19).