Los Angeles Dodgers fans celebrate in downtown Los Angeles as their team clinches another World Series title

A Los Angeles Dodgers fan stands on top of a Waymo as fans in downtown Los Angeles celebrate their team’s World Series title (Jason Armond/Getty Images)

Waymo Vehicles

Waymo to expand to Minneapolis, Tampa, and New Orleans

Waymo currently operates in five cities with plans for 20, while Tesla operates in two with named plans for seven so far.

Rani Molla

11/20/25 9:00AM

It’s been a big week for autonomous cars, and it’s only getting bigger.

Right on the heels of announcing this week that its driverless cars would be available to the public next year in five more markets — Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando — Google’s Waymo said Thursday that it’s also planning to expand to Minneapolis, Tampa, and New Orleans. It will begin manual testing there in the “coming days.”

Currently in five cities in the US, Waymo already plans to more than quadruple that number, and says there’s “more to be announced.”

The company did not provide a time frame for the most recent announced expansion, but typically Waymo follows a set of procedures in each city: it reveals that it will expand to that market, tests with — and then without — drivers, and finally opens to the public.

The time between Waymo announcing its expansion to a city and actually opening to the public in that city has been getting shorter. Most recently, Waymo became available through the Uber app in Atlanta in June, less than a year after the company said it would expand there.

Waymo’s biggest competitor, Tesla, also made some big progress this week. It got approval to launch its robotaxi service in Phoenix — one of the markets it said during its annual shareholder meeting that it was expanding to in addition to Las Vegas, Dallas, Houston, and Miami.

Currently, Tesla operates a ride-hailing service in Austin, with a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and in the Bay Area, with a driver using supervised Full Self-Driving tech. As of this week, the app is no longer invite-only in those cities but is now open to the iPhone-holding public. On the last earnings call, CEO Elon Musk said the company planned to operate in 8 to 10 markets by the end of the year.

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