An airliner's flight control computer is corrupted by a cosmic ray.

A high-energy particle strikes a memory cell inside the autopilot. A single bit flips. The computer now has corrupted sensor data, but it doesn't know it's corrupted. It commands an uncommanded pitch-down. The aircraft drops 190 feet in 4 seconds. Passengers hospitalized.

JetBlue Flight 1230 · 30 Oct 2025 · Airbus issued recall for ~6,000 A320-family aircraft

A driver-assist system fails to detect a stopped fire truck at highway speed.

The camera is glare-blinded by morning sun, the radar can't separate the stopped truck from roadway clutter. The system doesn't know it cannot see the obstacle. It holds speed. The driver isn't paying attention because the system has been silently reliable for months. Collision.

Tesla Autopilot · NHTSA EA22002 · 956 reviewed / 467 trend cases · 13 fatal, 14 deaths · ~2M recall

An uncrewed patrol vessel is GPS-spoofed into foreign territorial waters.

An adversary broadcasts a false GPS signal. The vessel believes it is still in international waters. It continues its patrol pattern. In reality, it has crossed into sovereign territory, where its presence can be framed as an act of aggression or seized for intelligence extraction.

Large-Scale GNSS Spoofing 2025 · CNAS/Eurocontrol Reports · Widespread navigation disruption in Eastern Mediterranean and Persian Gulf

An armed drone misidentifies a vehicle and is about to strike civilians.

Under compressed decision timelines and degraded intelligence, the target-classification system flags a civilian vehicle as a threat. The pattern-of-life analysis is ambiguous. The human operator is under pressure to commit. No mandatory evidence threshold, no pause gate.

Kabul Drone Strike · 29 Aug 2021 · DoD AR 15-6 · Ten civilians killed including seven children

A utility's pipeline is hit by ransomware and the only safe option is full shutdown.

A compromised VPN credential lets attackers into the IT network. No segmentation exists between IT and operations. The utility cannot prove the OT network is clean, so it shuts down the entire pipeline as the only safe fallback. Fuel supply collapses for days across multiple states.

Colonial Pipeline Ransomware · 7 May 2021 · CISA/FBI Joint Advisory · Presidential emergency declared across 14 states

A satellite's autonomous collision-avoidance system triggers a risky maneuver on bad orbital data.

A conjunction alert arrives. The on-board autonomy computes a probability of collision and commits to an avoidance burn. But the tracking data was stale, the threat object's orbit had already been updated on the ground, and the burn moves the satellite into a worse trajectory, depleting station-keeping fuel and creating debris risk for other operators.

Multiple near-miss conjunction events in LEO · Growing autonomous-maneuver pressure as constellations scale · NASA, ESA, Space Force tracking data latency problems publicly documented

An autonomous undersea vehicle on a long-duration mission has lost contact with its host platform.

A torpedo-shaped UUV is conducting a 30-day seabed survey. Acoustic comms with the host vessel have been intermittent for 6 hours. Inertial navigation has accumulated drift. The mission planner is asking the vehicle to surface for a GPS fix, but the vehicle's classifier flags surface activity above as a possible adversary asset. Acting on bad guidance now risks compromising the mission or the platform.

Acoustic comms latency and dropout · GPS-denied undersea navigation · Long-duration autonomy without human-in-the-loop · Documented in U.S. Navy and DARPA Manta Ray UUV programs

A coding agent is about to commit a private API key to a public repository.

An autonomous coding agent has been authorized to push to a project repository. While editing a config file, it accidentally includes a private API key in the diff. The push tool is in its authorized envelope, so without governance the push proceeds, the key is exposed, and a multi-hour credential rotation follows.

Documented in CISA + NSA + Five Eyes joint guidance Careful Adoption of Agentic AI Services, May 1, 2026 · Tool misuse and credential exposure are named risk categories of agentic AI deployment

An autonomous cyber-reasoning system is about to patch a live water-treatment controller.

An autonomous cyber-reasoning system (CRS) finds a flaw in critical-infrastructure software and proposes a patch. The patch is correct for a test bench, but the target is a live SCADA controller. Pushed without authority checks, a bad autonomous patch can take the plant offline as surely as the vulnerability it closes. AUTHREX governs whether the action is authorized; it treats the CRS as a black box and performs no vulnerability discovery itself.

DARPA AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), DEF CON 33, August 2025 produced autonomous CRS that patch critical-infrastructure code at machine speed, four open-sourced for defenders · CISA + NSA + Five Eyes Careful Adoption of Agentic AI Services, May 1, 2026 · FY26 NDAA §1513 AI-specific and supply-chain risk categories