A safety monitor rides in the front passenger seat as a Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin in January (Jay Janner/Getty Images)

Takes two to Taxi

Tesla Robotaxi expands to 2 new cities, but it looks like there’s just 1 driverless car in each

There’s an unsupervised Tesla Robotaxi service in both Houston and Austin, but, with just one vehicle so far in each city, it will be difficult to find.

Rani Molla

4/20/26 8:40AM

Tesla says it has expanded its Robotaxi service to two new cities, with Dallas and Houston joining existing offerings in Austin and the Bay Area. A video posted by the company shows a Model Y driving through both cities without a driver, and several riders have posted videos of their own rides.

The catch: availability appears extremely limited. Based on early data from Robotaxi Tracker, there may be just one vehicle operating in each city so far, making it tough to actually get a ride.

Robotaxi now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠 pic.twitter.com/G3KFQwqGxB
— Tesla Robotaxi (@robotaxi) April 18, 2026

The service also only covers roughly 30 square miles of Dallas and 25 square miles of Houston, a small fraction of each city, whose city limits alone add up to nearly 1,000 square miles. While it’s normal for an autonomous taxi service to start with a few cars in a limited area and to scale over time, it’s important to note that Tesla has been extremely slow in this regard.

In Austin, for example, the Robotaxi service launched in June with about 10 cars. Nearly a year later, there are currently 45 in the fleet and, despite promises to the contrary, most of those vehicles still have a human safety monitor in the front passenger seat.

On a recent trip to the Bay Area, where Tesla operates a service more akin to Uber with approximately 500 supervised Robotaxis, I frequently received “High service demand. Please come back later” messages at all hours of the day when trying to book one.

Tesla said in its Q4 earnings that it would expand Robotaxi service to nine markets — including Miami and Phoenix — by the first half of 2026, as the company ties its future to autonomous driving. With about two months to go, that timeline looks increasingly tight.

Jon Keegan2h

FT: Meta considering “tens of billions” in new capital to fund AI

Just days after Google announced a monster $85 billion upsized equity raise, the extremely profitable Meta is seeking to sell “tens of billions of dollars” in stock, according to a new report from the Financial Times.

Meta is planning on spending between $125 billion and $145 billion on AI capital expenditure this year alone.

Shares dropped more than 5% on the news.

Meta weighs big equity raising after blockbuster Google deal

Rani Molla

Meta is supercharging its subscription businesses

The free-app giant never really cared about recurring revenue. Now, it’s launching paid plans for all sorts of stuff.

Jon Keegan7h

FT: Anthropic staff helping the NSA use Mythos for offensive cyberattacks

Anthropic’s Mythos AI model was deemed too dangerous to release to the public, with the company citing its ability to orchestrate novel cyberattacks.

And that’s just what the National Security Agency is doing, with the help of Anthropic staff embedded at the agency, according to a report from the Financial Times.

Only a small number of companies and US allies have been given access to the advanced model, which means America’s adversaries have not had the chance to shore up their defenses against the AI model’s new offensive capabilities.

The arrangement is especially unusual as the Pentagon has deemed Anthropic’s AI a national security supply chain risk — effectively blacklisting it for defense work — in response to the company’s refusal to allow its technology to be used for any legal application, which could include autonomous killing or mass surveillance. Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the determination.

US National Security Agency using Anthropic’s Mythos for cyber attacks

Rani Molla8h

Longtime Tesla bear JPMorgan upgraded Tesla and raised its price target to $475 from $145

For more than a decade, JPMorgan was Wall Street’s most stubborn Tesla skeptic, anchored by auto analyst Ryan Brinkman’s strict focus on traditional car fundamentals and near-term delivery numbers.

But JPM recently handed coverage of the stock to a new analyst, Rajat Gupta, who is throwing that playbook out the window. In a note Friday, the firm upgraded Tesla to “neutral” from “underweight” and raised its price target 228% to $475 from $145. (The analyst consensus on FactSet is $403.) Instead of focusing on the company’s struggling vehicle business, the new analyst is orienting himself more toward Tesla’s idea of the future, now modeling Tesla’s physical AI and robotaxi fleets all the way out to the year 2040.

Here are the main reasons for the capitulation:

Looking past the car lot: Gupta argues that Tesla “is at the forefront of physical AI, entering uncharted TAMs” and therefore “deserves the benefit of the doubt to be valued on LT earnings potential” rather than near-term speed bumps.
Unmatched vertical integration: Tesla’s control over everything from battery cells to custom silicon gives it a massive moat. JPM notes this starting point advantage is “unmatched at an industrial level scale” and “still somewhat under-appreciated and misunderstood.”
The AWS flywheel effect: Deploying Optimus robots inside its own factories “should not only lower COGS for the base automotive business, but more importantly, help validate the product at an industrial scale.” Gupta called it “a classic flywheel effect, somewhat analogous to AWS and Kiva at AMZN.”

For Tesla bulls who have argued for years that this is an AI company and not a carmaker, JPM’s sudden $3.9 trillion valuation model is the ultimate validation.

Anthropic ponders self-improving AI

Anthropic says Claude already writes 80% of its code. A new post asks what happens when the models can improve themselves — and whether anyone could stop them.

Jon Keegan8h