Waymo autonomous vehicle kills bodega cat in San Francisco
A Waymo robotaxi killed a popular bodega cat named KitKat in San Francisco's Mission District on October 27, 2025. While Waymo claimed the cat darted under the vehicle, video evidence showed the cat had been underneath for some time before the vehicle drove off.
Records by entity: Waymo
A Waymo robotaxi killed a bodega cat in San Francisco after failing to track the animal's position under the vehicle.
The autonomous system lacked object permanence, causing it to forget the cat's presence once it was out of sight under the car.
Key facts
- What
- A Waymo robotaxi killed a popular bodega cat named KitKat in San Francisco's Mission District on October 27, 2025.
- Incident date
- Oct 27, 2025
- Who
- Waymo
- Failure mode
- Agentic Action Error
- AI surface
- Autonomous System
- Severity
- Medium
What happened
A Waymo autonomous vehicle struck and killed a bodega cat named KitKat in San Francisco's Mission District. The incident occurred on October 27, 2025, shortly before midnight near Randa's Market. The vehicle ran over the animal as it pulled away from a stop.
What broke inside the model
The system suffered from a lack of object permanence, meaning it failed to maintain awareness of the cat's presence once it was out of sight beneath the vehicle. Consequently, the robotaxi drove forward while the cat was still underneath, ignoring a bystander's attempt to rescue the animal.
What it cost
Sources
- PressVideo of KitKat killing by Waymo undercuts company's claimmissionlocal.org
- PressWaymo robotaxi kills 'one-of-a-kind' bodega cat, owner ...sfstandard.com
- PressSF Mission neighbors mourn bodega cat allegedly killed by ...abc7news.com
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/waymo-autonomous-vehicle-kills-bodega-catAI Failure Index. "Waymo autonomous vehicle kills bodega cat in San Francisco" (FI-0619). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/waymo-autonomous-vehicle-kills-bodega-cat (indexed Jun 22, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0619. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm fits
- Prism
- OmniGuard
- AgentRealm
This entry sits in the index's predictive wing: a system that scores, ranks, perceives, or steers rather than generates. Realm's runtime layer is built for the generative and agentic systems now moving into these same decision seats, where it watches a model's internal state and holds an unsupported claim or an unchecked action before it commits. The control gap on this record, an automated decision that reached people with no runtime check in front of it, is the same gap. The index keeps predictive failures on the record because the pattern carries straight into the systems shipping today.