Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang speaks during Nvidia Live at CES 2026 (Patrick T. Fallon/Getty Images)

Nvidia’s autonomous tech gives other automakers a chance to take on Tesla

Nvidia made a number of autonomous vehicle announcements at CES yesterday that should have Tesla worried.

1/6/26 9:00AM

Updated 1/6/26 1:54PM

Tesla is known for being an island. While most other carmakers and robotaxi services rely on an intricate web of hardware and software partnerships, Tesla does nearly everything in-house, from vehicle construction to the AI that powers its Full Self-Driving technology.

Enter Nvidia, whose autonomous driving software and hardware announcements yesterday underscore how Tesla’s once inaccessible approach to autonomy is becoming something other automakers can buy.

Presenting at the CES conference in Las Vegas yesterday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled Alpamayo, an open “reasoning” AI model family designed specifically for autonomous driving. The Alpamayo family of tools will introduce “chain-of-thought” models that can assess “novel or rare scenarios step by step.” In the press release accompanying the announcement, Huang said that the “ChatGPT moment for physical AI is here” and that he expects robotaxis to be among the first to benefit. Nvidia confirmed that Mercedes-Benz will begin shipping cars with the technology this year, offering advanced driver-assistance features comparable to Tesla’s FSD. (Mercedes’ former parent, Daimler, once held a 10% equity stake in Tesla.)

The AI chip designer also announced that it’s expanding its DRIVE Hyperion autonomous vehicle platform, bringing in a wide range of auto suppliers and sensor makers as it pushes the system as a ready-to-use foundation for self-driving cars and robotaxis. The platform bundles Nvidia’s latest Thor chips with cameras, radar, and lidar, centralized vehicle controls, and safety, simulation, and AI training tools — effectively packaging many of the pieces Tesla has built in-house into a system other automakers can use.

Taken together, the announcements show Nvidia turning autonomy into a platform business — one that could erode Tesla’s long-standing advantage by allowing rivals to buy the hardware, software, and safety infrastructure Tesla built for itself.

“I’m not losing any sleep about this,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has had a notably chummy relationship with Huang, posted last night — one of several about the Nvidia announcements. “And I genuinely hope they succeed.”

I’m not losing any sleep about this.

And I genuinely hope they succeed.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 6, 2026

In another comment, Musk noted that there’s a years-long interval between when autonomous tech “sort of works to where it is much safer than a human,” suggesting that Tesla is way ahead of any would-be competitors. Indeed, Musk added, “This is maybe a competitive pressure on Tesla in 5 or 6 years, but probably longer.”

Tesla is down about more than 4% today, while Nvidia, up slightly earlier today, is flat. Aeva, a 4D lidar company Nvidia announced a partnership with, soared as high as 37%.

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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.

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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