Waymo with the Bay Bridge in the background in San Francisco, California (Smith Collection/Getty Images)

Mapped: Where Google’s Waymo is, will be, and might go

Waymo is operating more than 2,000 autonomous vehicles and testing in many markets. Meanwhile, Tesla’s autonomous operations are tiny, but its ambitions are huge.

Rani Molla

9/15/25 9:25AM

As Tesla stakes its future on autonomous cars and as self-driving competitors like Amazon’s Zoox start popping up, Google’s Waymo remains the elephant in the room.

Currently, Waymo is publicly operating more than 2,000 autonomous vehicles in five markets — Los Angeles, Atlanta, Austin, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area — and the company already intends to launch in five more: Dallas, Denver, Miami, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

It has also tested, or is currently testing, the service in a dozen other markets. We’ve comprehensively mapped Waymo’s operations for the first time, showing that the service has quietly made inroads across the country:

Meanwhile, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is pushing to surpass Waymo with the flip of a switch, as he theorizes that once the technology is tested sufficiently, many Teslas can drive themselves autonomously with the parts and software they already have.

“I think we’ll probably have autonomous ride-hailing in probably half of the population of the US by the end of the year,” Musk said on the company’s earnings call in July.

Tesla currently operates approximately 30 autonomous ride-hailing vehicles in Austin with safety monitors sitting in the passenger seat. The company is also operating a more traditional ride-hailing service in the Bay Area, where people can pay to be driven around by a person in the driver’s seat using the company’s supervised full self-driving tech.

While the public can download the app and join the waitlist for both, the company hasn’t stated how many people it’s allowing to use the program. (I’m still on the waitlist.)

Musk has repeatedly said Tesla will be able to scale its autonomous driving service far faster than Waymo, as Tesla owners will be able to add their personal vehicles to the robotaxi network for extra income. On the last earnings call, he pegged that milestone for “next year.”

But for now at least, Waymo is far in the lead.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

6/17/26

Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5