Safety failure
Realized harm
Waymo passengers were stranded mid-ride when a bystander covered the vehicle's sensors, with no in-vehicle way to resolve it
AIR-2024-0005 AIR record · 2024-02-waymo-sensor-obstruction-passengers-trapped
A real party was affected. This incident caused actual consequences, not a demonstrated capability.
From the supporting source
On Saturday, Robert and his husband said a person who looked homeless was trying to cover the sensors of the vehicle as the light turned green.abc7news.com
The record
Disclosed
2024-02-03
Occurred
2024-02-03
Vendor
Waymo (Alphabet)
Product
Waymo Driver
Risk domain
Agent behaviour › Unsafe actuation
Also touches
Uncontrolled resource consumption
System type
Classical autonomy (no generative model)
Who acted
Agent acted — the vehicle stranded its passengers mid-ride
Attack surface
Autonomous operations
Autonomy level
Fully autonomous
Initial vector
Physical sensor manipulation
Impact type
Physical safety, Service disruption
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
two passengers on one ride; class of failure affects every driverless ride
Capability abused
Defense & remediation
Recorded defense
remote support line
Guardrail kinds
Unknown
Guardrail outcome
Silent
Fix shipped
unknown
Taxonomy & references
Curator notes
Low-severity but structurally interesting: an adversary needs no software access to halt a fully autonomous agent, only its sensors, and the passengers had no override. Physical-layer denial of service against an embodied agent. Remote support told riders to stay in the vehicle. AI Incident Database incident 853.
Supporting sources
Cite as
Enkrypt AI. "Waymo passengers were stranded mid-ride when a bystander covered the vehicle's sensors, with no in-vehicle way to resolve it". AIR, AIR-2024-0005. https://agentincident.vercel.app/i/AIR-2024-0005/ (accessed 2026-10-19).