AI incident ·
Hawaii Police Deployed Robot Dog to Patrol a Homeless Encampment
On this page 8 sections
In brief
An AI system built by Boston Dynamics and deployed by Honolulu Police Department allegedly harmed Honolulu Homeless People.
- Risk domain
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Occurred
- Coverage
- 4 reports
What happened
Honolulu Police Department spent federal pandemic relief funds on a robot dog to take body temperatures and patrol a homeless quarantine encampment which local civil rights advocates criticized as dehumanizing.
Laws on record for this risk area
Policy angle: Classified under Human-Computer Interaction (Loss of human agency and autonomy) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 instruments on record cover this risk area.
- India DPDP Act
- Law on Artificial Intelligence (2025)
- Law No. 132/2025 on artificial intelligence
- EU AI Act
- Texas Responsible AI Governance Act (TRAIGA)
Matched from the record's risk category and country to the instruments in effect recorded here: a law listed covers the area, which is not a finding that it applies to this incident. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).
News reports (4)
Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- Honolulu Police Department
- Alleged developer
- Boston Dynamics
- Alleged harmed party
- Honolulu Homeless People
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Risk subdomain
- 5.2 Loss of human agency and autonomy
- Causal entity
- Human
- Intent
- Intentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
- Harm level
- —
- Sectors
- —
- Countries
- —
Risk entries describing this failure mode
Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 5.2.
- Autonomy/agency loss
"Autonomy/agency loss - Loss of an individual, group or organisation’s ability to make informed decisions or pursue goals."
- Personality rights loss
"Personality rights loss - Loss of or restrictions to the rights of an individual to control the commercial use of their identity, such as name, image, likeness, or other unequivocal identifiers."
- Autonomy
"Autonomy - Loss of or restrictions to the ability or rights of an individual, group or entity to make decisions and control their identity and/or output."
- Gradual loss of control
"Gradual or accumulative loss of control risks can be described as risks resulting from the accumulation of less severe disruptions that gradually weakens systemic resilience until a critical event triggers a catastrophe...
- AI enables automation of military decision-making
"One concern here is humans not remaining in the loop for some military decisions, creating the possibility of unintentional escalation because of: • Automated tactical decision-making, by ‘in-theatre’ AI systems (e.g. b...
- AI-induced strategic instability
"For example, AI could undermine nuclear strategic stability by making it easier to discover and destroy previously secure nuclear launch facilities [30, 46, 49]. AI may also offer more extreme first-strike advantages or...
- Humans might increasingly hand over control to misaligned AI systems
"Organisations around the world are already deploying misaligned AI systems that are causing harm in unexpected ways.250 Recommendation algorithms increase the consumption of extremist content.251 Medical algorithms have...
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"Humans may increasingly hand over control of important decisions to AI systems, due to economic and geopolitical incentives. Some experts are concerned that future advanced AI systems will seek to increase their own inf...
Incidents in the same risk subdomain
- DisMech AI Curation Agent Reportedly Completed GitHub Issue Intended as New Contributor's Learning Task
- Waymo Driverless Taxi Allegedly Stalled During Pedestrian Harassment Incident in San Francisco
- California Police Turned on Music to Allegedly Trigger Instagram’s DCMA to Avoid Being Live-Streamed
Source record: incident #207 on the AI Incident Database · all 4 reports