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.

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