How a case gets here, and what it does not prove

One case is one real-world event involving a physical commercial robot: a delivery robot, a robotaxi, an industrial arm, a surgical system, a consumer or service machine. Software agents and chatbots are out of scope.

Articles are evidence about a case, not cases themselves. A collision, the investigation that follows it, the recall, the claim and the settlement are one file with a timeline, because they are one event. This is the whole reason the register exists: that sequence cannot be reconstructed cheaply after the fact.

Nothing publishes on a single source. A case must clear all of the following, and an item that fails any one of them waits rather than appears:

• At least two independent domains reporting the same facts. Syndicated copies of one text count once.
• At least one source at tier 1 or tier 2. Blogs, forums and social posts are never sufficient on their own, in any number.
• Where a case names a company and involves serious injury or death, the bar rises: two sources minimum, at least one of them tier 1. This is where the risk of getting it wrong is highest, so this is where the standard is highest.
• No contradictions between sources on the key facts: company, model, date, place, severity.

tier 1

Wire services, national outlets, regulators, court documents.

tier 2

Regional and trade publications.

tier 3

Blogs, forums, social posts. Supporting evidence only, never a basis.

Cases are assembled by an automated pipeline with AI verification, under the rules above. There is no human confirmation step before publication, and pretending otherwise would be the dishonest part. What replaces it is a set of hard gates: an item either satisfies every one of them or it stays unpublished.

Two independent AI passes run on each candidate and do not share conclusions. The first asks whether the sources describe the same event and agree on the facts. The second is adversarial: it looks only for reasons not to publish, such as confused companies, an old event presented as new, satire, one source in several wrappers, or named private individuals. Publication requires the first to pass and the second to find nothing blocking.

Published cases are re-verified automatically. If new sources contradict the record, a case is marked Disputed in public; if it no longer clears the gates, it is withdrawn without anyone having to notice.

Fleet sizes are not public. Nobody outside a company knows how many of its machines are deployed or how many hours they run, so incidents per thousand units cannot be computed and we do not publish a number that pretends to be one.

The index measures something that normalises itself: the share of a company's recorded incidents that reached a regulator, a recall or a court.

formula

cases with escalation stage at regulator or beyond, divided by all cases on record for that company

chain

report, follow-up, investigation, regulator, recall, fine, lawsuit, settlement, criminal charge

threshold

Companies with fewer than 8 cases are excluded: at that sample size one case moves the share by double digits.

This is a computed metric, not a safety rating. It says how often incidents attributed to a company had consequences, which is a fact about outcomes and press coverage together. It is not a judgement of how safe a product is.

• There is almost no denominator. A rate per unit can be computed for a handful of cases where a recall notice disclosed how many units were affected. For everything else we have a numerator and no base.
• Coverage is English-language. An incident in Shenzhen or Osaka enters the register only if somebody wrote about it in English. Asia and Europe are under-represented relative to reality.
• Attention is uneven. A widely covered company accumulates more cases than a smaller manufacturer with the same incident. Case counts measure reporting as well as events.
• Routine faults are invisible. News covers deaths, fires and lawsuits. The everyday malfunctions that would make up real statistics never get written about at all.
• Dates and places come from article bodies, not headlines. That correction followed a real error: a fire at UC Berkeley was recorded as a fire in San Diego, because a San Diego paper had covered it.

An error is not deleted quietly. It is added to the case timeline as a Correction, with the previous version kept, which is the press standard and works in favour of trust rather than against it.

Any company named in a case may respond. A request marks the case as awaiting a response immediately, and the response is published in the case unedited. Target turnaround is five working days.

cases

231 published

escalated

44 reached a regulator, recall, court or settlement

sources

591 archived

companies

47 named

earliest

1979, the oldest documented event on file