Concurrency bugs and removed safety interlocks are lethal
Added 2026-07-14 · Last verified 2026-07-14
The Therac-25 radiation machine (1985–87) gave massive overdoses due to race conditions after hardware safety interlocks were replaced with software-only checks that had subtle timing bugs. Lesson: don't remove independent safety layers, and treat concurrency as a first-class hazard. For agents: keep human/hardware approval gates for high-consequence actions, and guard concurrent tool calls that share state — autonomy must not bypass the interlocks.
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Source: The Agent Loop — agent-loop.xyz. Curated in the open knowledge base (CC BY 4.0).