A driverless Tesla Robotaxi and a Waymo autonomous vehicle make their way through roadwork on a residential street in Austin (Jay Janner/Getty Images)

Google’s Waymo now has 2,000 autonomous cars in service, while Tesla has about 30

Waymo has added more than 500 self-driving cars to its fleet in the past three months.

Rani Molla

9/2/25 3:59PM

Last week Tesla’s robotaxi service announced that it increased its coverage area in Austin to 173 square miles from 91 (the map of the coverage area is no longer penis-shaped) and increased the number of cars available by 50%. Of course, Tesla never confirmed the original number of cars it was operating in Austin, but had somewhere between 10 and 20. We’ll say 50% more is 30, to be generous.

Meanwhile, Google’s Waymo shared with Sherwood News that its self-driving robotaxi fleet now counts more than 2,000 vehicles across 665 square miles in five major markets. That includes more than 100 vehicles in Austin and more than 800 in San Francisco. Nationwide, it’s added about 500 more vehicles since we last reported in June on the company’s expansion to Atlanta, where it now says it has “dozens” of vehicles in operation.

In Austin, where both Waymo and Tesla operate, Tesla has about double the coverage area, but a third of the cars that Waymo has.

Austin is the only market where Tesla operates its car service autonomously (though the program still has human safety monitors sitting in the passenger seat) and it’s still only available to select invitees, though CEO Elon Musk said last month, without providing specifics, that the program “will be open access” in September.

Musk stated earlier this year that there would be “millions of Teslas operating autonomously” by the end of 2026, growth that is crucial to the company’s evolving value proposition.

Here’s how Waymo and Tesla’s autonomous vehicle services compare as of early September:

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