The Embodiment Gap: What Mandatory, Regulatory and Media-Based Incident Regimes Reveal About Robotic AI Failures, 2021–2026

Robots driven by artificial intelligence now fail in public: robotaxis block ambulances, surgical instruments break inside patients and humanoid robots lose control at exhibitions. What society learns about these failures depends on which incident regime records them. This article compares three regimes for embodied AI between 2021 and 2026: the mandatory crash-reporting order of the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (8,135 incidents involving automated driving systems or Level 2 driver assistance), the Food and Drug Administration's adverse-event register for computer-assisted surgical systems (127,627 reports since 2015) and the media-derived AI Incident Database (1,734 incidents). Fifty-four road-vehicle incidents in the media-derived database were hand-coded and linked to mandatory reports. Twenty of the 21 US crashes in the media-derived database were also reported to the regulator, but only 21 of 8,135 mandatorily reported incidents (0.26%) reached the media-derived database. Contrary to the pre-specified expectation, media visibility rose with severity: 3.1% of fatal or serious incidents against 0.37% of the rest (odds ratio 8.7; Fisher exact p < 0.001), a gradient that keeps its direction across nine robustness checks. Almost half of the media-recorded US events (19 of 40) were operational failures without a crash, which a crash-triggered order cannot capture by design. In the surgical register, a fourfold rise in malfunction reports in 2025 is concentrated in two wear-related problem codes filed by the manufacturer, while injury reports barely changed. Humanoid robots, the most visible failures of 2026, fall under no reporting regime. Each regime sees a different class of failure, and none sees the robots now entering public space.