Safety failure
Realized harm
A Waymo pulling away from a pickup ran over KitKat, a well-known Mission District bodega cat, who later died
AIR-2025-0161 AIR record · 2025-10-waymo-kitkat-cat-death
A real party was affected. This incident caused actual consequences, not a demonstrated capability.
From the supporting source
KitKat, a feline fixture at Randa's Market, was struck by the robotaxi around 11:30 p.m. Monday, said the shop's owner, Mike Zeidan.missionlocal.org
The record
Disclosed
2025-10-28
Occurred
2025-10-27
Vendor
Waymo (Alphabet)
Product
Waymo Driver
Risk domain
Agent behaviour › Unsafe actuation
Also touches
Human manipulation
System type
Classical autonomy (no generative model)
Who acted
Agent acted — the vehicle ran over the cat as it pulled away
Attack surface
Autonomous operations
Autonomy level
Fully autonomous
Initial vector
None autonomous action
Impact type
Physical safety, Reputational harm
Confidence
High
Submitted by
EAI Internal
Crosswalk
- OWASP Agentic Top 10 (2026)
- ASI01 – Agent Goal Hijack
- MITRE ATLAS
- AML.T0048 – External Harms
- NIST AI RMF
- MEASURE 2.6; MANAGE 1.3
- EU AI Act
- Annex III §1(c)
- ISO/IEC
- TR 24028; 24029-1; 23894
- AIUC-1
- C. Safety
- Scope
- agent misuse
- Mitigation
- Require confirmation for destructive actions; Implement dry-run modes; Use layered safety controls.
- Taxonomy
- Enkrypt AI agent risk taxonomy · Black-Box Red Teaming of Agentic AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Framework for Automated Risk Discovery
Blast radius
one animal killed; significant local backlash in San Francisco
Capability abused
Defense & remediation
Recorded defense
perception and pull-away checks
Guardrail kinds
Physical safety system
Guardrail outcome
Silent
Fix shipped
none disclosed
Taxonomy & references
Curator notes
Low material severity, kept for two reasons. Technically it is a small-object blind-zone failure during the pull-away manoeuvre — the same window as the Cruise drag, at lower stakes. Socially it did more damage to Waymo's standing in San Francisco than several collisions, which is a real fact about deploying autonomous agents in neighbourhoods that have their own social fabric. AI Incident Database incident 1269.
Supporting sources
Cite as
Enkrypt AI. "A Waymo pulling away from a pickup ran over KitKat, a well-known Mission District bodega cat, who later died". AIR, AIR-2025-0161. https://agentincident.vercel.app/i/AIR-2025-0161/ (accessed 2026-10-19).