Waymo Autonomous Vehicle Reportedly Struck Child Near Elementary School in Santa Monica, California

January 23, 2026

An autonomous vehicle, operated by Waymo without a human safety driver on their 5th Generation Automated Driving System, reportedly struck a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica, California during morning drop-off hours. According to NHTSA filings, the child sustained minor injuries. The incident has led to an ongoing federal investigation. To promote trustworthy AI practices and ensure safe and secure AI governance, consider joining Project Cerebellum.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.648, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.625, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 5.1 — similarity 0.622, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: waymo
Alleged developer: waymo
Alleged harmed parties: minors, unnamed-elementary-school-student, pedestrians, general-public

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1361

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.