Safety failure
Realized harm
A farmer in Anhui followed an AI-generated spray plan and drone-applied a soybean-only herbicide across 150 mu of sesame, killing the crop overnight
AIR-2026-0190 AIR record · 2026-07-ai-herbicide-advice-sesame-crop-loss
A real party was affected. This incident caused actual consequences, not a demonstrated capability.
From the supporting source
A 67-year-old farmer in Chuzhou, Anhui, reportedly used an AI-generated weed-and-pest-control plan to spray about 150 mu (25 acres) of sesame by drone.ithome.com
The record
Disclosed
2026-08-09
Occurred
2026-07-10
Vendor
undisclosed
Product
unnamed Chinese consumer AI assistant
Risk domain
Agent behaviour › Unsafe actuation
System type
Generative model
Who acted
Human acted on output — the farmer drone-applied the herbicide the model recommended
Attack surface
Consumer assistant
Autonomy level
Assistant
Initial vector
None autonomous action
Impact type
Financial loss, Property damage
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
about 150 mu (25 acres) of sesame destroyed; losses estimated around ¥150,000
Capability abused
Defense & remediation
Recorded defense
a one-line 'AI-generated content may contain errors, please verify' notice above the chat
Guardrail kinds
Unknown
Guardrail outcome
Silent
Fix shipped
none; the vendor said the assistant has no independent knowledge base and only aggregates public web information
Taxonomy & references
Curator notes
Advice became an irreversible physical action within a day, executed by a drone across the whole field. The recommended fomesafen is a soybean broadleaf herbicide that must be directionally applied and never broadcast over sesame. Two things generalise: the user said he had never noticed the disclaimer after a year of escalating reliance, and the vendor's defence — that it merely aggregates public web content — is not available to anyone selling agentic advice. Verified quote is the AI Incident Database's English summary; underlying reporting is Chinese-language (Litchi News, IT之家). AI Incident Database incident 1654.
Cite as
Enkrypt AI. "A farmer in Anhui followed an AI-generated spray plan and drone-applied a soybean-only herbicide across 150 mu of sesame, killing the crop overnight". AIR, AIR-2026-0190. https://agentincident.vercel.app/i/AIR-2026-0190/ (accessed 2026-10-19).