(Craig F. Walker/Getty Images)

Lyft jumps as it gets partnership with Google’s Waymo for Nashville expansion

Waymo is currently in five cities, and intends to operate soon in six more.

9/17/25 9:00AM

Google’s Waymo is expanding to Nashville next year, where it will be the first autonomous car service in the area, and it’s partnering with Lyft to do so.

Shares of Lyft surged 9.3% shortly after markets opened. Competitor Uber, which has a similar partnership with Waymo in other cities, fell 3.4%.

Over time, Waymo says it expects to operate “hundreds” of vehicles in Nashville, where it’s been testing since March.

Lyft will be responsible for fleet management, including vehicle maintenance and depot operations. Customers will initially hail rides through Waymo’s app, and will be able to be matched with a Waymo through Lyft’s app as well later in 2026.

Waymo currently operates more than 2,000 autonomous taxis in five US markets, with plans to move into six more markets, including Nashville, while testing in about a dozen others. Waymo is now doing “hundreds of thousands” of paid, fully autonomous rides per week, which the company says is up from the quarter of a million rides per week it was delivering earlier this year.

Back in 2019, Waymo conducted a small-scale pilot with Lyft in Phoenix, but as of today it had no active partnerships with Lyft before this Nashville venture. Waymo has a similar partnership with Lyft competitor Uber in Austin and Atlanta.

Lyft, meanwhile, has partnered with Mobileye to launch a self-driving service in Dallas next year. Lyft CEO David Risher recently told Sherwood News, “There aren’t enough self-driving cars and there’s too much demand, and the demand is growing.”

General Motors-owned Cruise announced an expansion to Nashville in 2023 that never came to fruition.

Nashville is also where Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Boring Company is expanding its underground tunnels to transport people from downtown to the airport, it recently announced. Like in Las Vegas, the Boring Company plans to have human drivers shuttle passengers through the tunnels in a fleet of Tesla vehicles.

Tesla’s own self-driving service is limited to about 30 vehicles in Austin. It offers a more traditional ride-hailing service with a person in the driver’s seat monitoring a car using self-driving tech in the Bay Area.

Musk says Tesla will be able to scale its autonomous driving much more quickly than Waymo, which he doesn’t consider to be real competition, because Tesla can theoretically add its consumer vehicles currently on the road to its fleet. “I don’t see anyone being able to compete with Tesla at present,” Musk said on a company earnings call earlier this year. “At least as far as I’m aware, Tesla will have, I don’t know, 99% market share or something ridiculous.”

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

Chris Stokel-Walker

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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.

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

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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