{
 "public_id": "AIR-2025-0197",
 "incident_id": "2025-12-waymo-sf-power-outage-gridlock",
 "date_disclosed": "2025-12-20",
 "date_occurred": "2025-12-20",
 "title": "With a third of San Francisco's traffic signals dark after a PG&E substation fire, Waymo vehicles escalated to remote confirmation en masse and added to citywide gridlock",
 "class": "safety_failure",
 "attack_surface": "autonomous_ops",
 "initial_vector": "none_autonomous_action",
 "agent_capability_abused": [
  "autonomous_driving",
  "remote_assistance_escalation",
  "fleet_coordination"
 ],
 "target_product": "Waymo Driver",
 "target_vendor": "Waymo (Alphabet)",
 "autonomy_level": "fully_autonomous",
 "impact_realized": true,
 "impact_type": [
  "service_disruption"
 ],
 "blast_radius": "citywide traffic during a major outage affecting ~30% of San Francisco; officials ordered the fleet off the road and law enforcement manually directed intersections",
 "cve": [],
 "taxonomy": {
  "owasp_asi": [
   "ASI08"
  ],
  "mitre_atlas": [],
  "labels": [
   "no_adversary",
   "correlated_failure",
   "remote_assistance_saturation",
   "infrastructure_dependency",
   "fleet_wide",
   "emergency_conditions"
  ]
 },
 "defense_present": "remote assistance for unfamiliar situations",
 "defense_bypassed": true,
 "fix_shipped": "service suspended during the outage; Waymo announced software and emergency-response updates",
 "primary_sources": [
  "https://www.businessinsider.com/waymo-explains-robotaxis-stalled-san-francisco-power-outage-scale-2025-12",
  "https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1326"
 ],
 "verified_quote": "The autonomous cars have been causing traffic jams throughout the city, as the vehicles seem unable to function without traffic signals.",
 "confidence": "high",
 "notes": "The scaling failure that matters most in this corpus. Each agent behaved conservatively and correctly by escalating to a human when signals went dark — but the escalation path is a shared, finite resource, so a correlated environmental change made every agent ask for help at once and the safety mechanism became the congestion. Waymo's own post-incident blog is a primary source. Same shape as the 2023 North Beach connectivity stall, at city scale. AI Incident Database incident 1326.",
 "risk_category": "reliability",
 "risk_secondary": [],
 "risk_subcategory": "Load & Resilience Failures",
 "risk_sub_secondary": [],
 "ai_entity": "non_generative_autonomy",
 "agency": "agent_acted",
 "agency_debatable": false,
 "agency_reason": "the fleet escalated en masse and added to citywide gridlock",
 "vector_family": "none_autonomous",
 "vector_detail": "none_autonomous_action",
 "guardrail_kind": [
  "human_supervision"
 ],
 "guardrail_outcome": "silent",
 "xrefs": {
  "aiid": [
   1326
  ],
  "atlas": [],
  "cve": [],
  "ghsa": []
 },
 "primary_asi": "ASI08",
 "agent_framework": "robotaxi_stack",
 "model_provider": "none",
 "model_name": "",
 "detection_mechanism": "unknown",
 "tool_access": "unknown",
 "financial_loss_band": "unknown",
 "eai_category": "uncontrolled_resource_consumption",
 "eai_domain": "tool_misuse",
 "eai_secondary": [],
 "eai_reason": "subcategory: Load & Resilience Failures",
 "asi_curated": [],
 "asi_scope": "in_scope",
 "asi_provenance": "rule",
 "asi_reason": "ASI08 (fleet fan-out in a non-generative stack; other mechanisms out of scope)",
 "submitted_by": "EAI Internal"
}