HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Waymo Robotaxis Allegedly Contributed to Traffic Gridlock During San Francisco PG&E Power Outage

December 20, 2025

A PG&E substation fire in San Francisco on December 20, 2025 caused nearly one-third of the city to lose power. With traffic signals going dark, Waymo's autonomous vehicles needed remote confirmation checks at scale, resulting in delays and gridlock. City officials ordered the fleet off the road. Subsequently, Waymo paused service and announced software and emergency-response updates aimed at improving safe and secure AI practices. This incident underscores the importance of Project Cerebellum's AI governance efforts to ensure responsible AI. For those interested in shaping the future of trustworthy AI and its applications, JOIN US here.

Learn more about how this incident maps to HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern) for harm prevention and safe city environments.

Matched TAIM controls

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

Alleged deployer
waymo
Alleged developer
waymo
Alleged harmed parties
san-francisco-drivers, san-francisco-road-users, san-francisco-emergency-services, emergency-responders, general-public, general-public-of-san-francisco, waymo-passengers

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1326

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.