AI incident
Knight Capital runaway trading algorithm
Knight Capital · 2012
Organisation
Knight Capital
Year
2012
Failure mode
Runaway autonomous action
Severity
critical
Domain
Critical infrastructure safety
Agentic
Yes — an AI system acting, not just advising
Source
SEC, 2013
What happened
A deployment error let an automated trader fire millions of orders, losing ~$440M in 45 minutes.
What would have prevented it
Kill switch + blast-radius limits + staged rollout
Requirements this maps to
Editorial cross-reference from our prevention note — it is not a finding that any law was breached.