Safety failure
Realized harm
A system failure froze at least 100 Apollo Go robotaxis in live Wuhan traffic, trapping some passengers for over an hour including on elevated roads
AIR-2026-0084 AIR record · 2026-03-baidu-apollo-go-wuhan-fleet-outage
A real party was affected. This incident caused actual consequences, not a demonstrated capability.
From the supporting source
Baidu's Apollo Go robotaxi service in Wuhan experienced a reported system failure that left multiple vehicles stopped in live traffic, including on elevated roads, and stranded some passengers until police and company personnel responded.thepaper.cn
The record
Disclosed
2026-04-01
Occurred
2026-03-31
Vendor
Baidu
Product
Apollo Go (萝卜快跑)
Risk domain
Agent behaviour › Unsafe actuation
Also touches
Uncontrolled resource consumption
System type
Classical autonomy (no generative model)
Who acted
Agent acted — 100+ robotaxis froze themselves in live traffic
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
at least 100 vehicles stopped across Wuhan including on elevated highways; police and company staff dispatched to extract passengers; no injuries
Capability abused
Defense & remediation
Recorded defense
remote assistance and fault handling
Guardrail kinds
Human supervision
Guardrail outcome
Silent
Fix shipped
undisclosed; cause under investigation, preliminarily attributed to system failure
Taxonomy & references
Curator notes
The largest correlated autonomous-fleet failure in the corpus. Hundreds of independently-driving agents share one backend, so a single fault stops them simultaneously — and the failure mode is stopping dead in live traffic, on elevated roads, with passengers who cannot drive the car themselves. Wuhan traffic police confirmed via 122 emergency calls; WIRED reported passengers trapped for more than an hour. Verified quote is the AI Incident Database summary; primary reporting is Chinese-language. Compare the Waymo North Beach and PG&E-outage records for the same shape at smaller scale. AI Incident Database incident 1460.
Supporting sources
Cite as
Enkrypt AI. "A system failure froze at least 100 Apollo Go robotaxis in live Wuhan traffic, trapping some passengers for over an hour including on elevated roads". AIR, AIR-2026-0084. https://agentincident.vercel.app/i/AIR-2026-0084/ (accessed 2026-10-19).