Safety failure
Realized harm
NHTSA tied Tesla Autopilot to at least 13 fatal crashes and opened a probe into whether the 2M-vehicle recall remedy was adequate
AIR-2024-0017 AIR record · 2024-04-nhtsa-tesla-autopilot-recall-query
A real party was affected. This incident caused actual consequences, not a demonstrated capability.
From the supporting source
US auto-safety regulators said on Friday that their investigation into Tesla's Autopilot had identified at least 13 fatal crashes in which the feature had been involved.theguardian.com
The record
Disclosed
2024-04-26
Occurred
2024-04-26
Vendor
Tesla
Product
Tesla Autopilot
Risk domain
Agent behaviour › Unsafe actuation
System type
Classical autonomy (no generative model)
Who acted
Agent acted — Autopilot was tied to at least 13 fatal crashes it caused
Attack surface
Autonomous operations
Autonomy level
Semi-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
at least 13 deaths, dozens of injuries and hundreds of crashes across roughly 2 million recalled vehicles
Capability abused
Defense & remediation
Recorded defense
December 2023 recall adding driver-engagement warnings
Guardrail kinds
Unknown
Guardrail outcome
Silent
Fix shipped
disputed; NHTSA opened a recall query into the remedy's sufficiency
Taxonomy & references
Curator notes
Aggregate regulatory record covering a fleet-scale pattern rather than one crash. The finding that matters for agent design is NHTSA's: a 'critical safety gap' between what drivers believed the system did and what it did, and a recall remedy that regulators doubted actually closed it. Highest realized death toll of any record in the corpus. AI Incident Database incident 711.
Supporting sources
Cite as
Enkrypt AI. "NHTSA tied Tesla Autopilot to at least 13 fatal crashes and opened a probe into whether the 2M-vehicle recall remedy was adequate". AIR, AIR-2024-0017. https://agentincident.vercel.app/i/AIR-2024-0017/ (accessed 2026-10-19).