Alphabet Waymo Storage Facility in San Francisco

San Francisco, CA - August 6, 2023: Aerial view of Alphabet’s Waymo fleet storage facility in the Bayview-Hunters Point district.

Waymore rides

Waymo’s had a quiet — but huge — increase in ridership

In one year in California, Waymo’s paid driverless rides increased from 12,000 to over 312,000 a month, though the unit still loses parent company Alphabet money.

Yiwen Lu

11/4/24 3:55PM

Waymo has quietly ramped up its status. A lot.

Last year, Waymo started offering paid, driverless rides to passengers in San Francisco. In the year since, Waymo went from 12,000 rides in August 2023 to over 312,000 rides in August 2024. Its service area in California also expanded from one city to multiple, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, and three cities in the San Francisco Peninsula, where the region’s main airport is located.

During an earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, Waymo’s parent company, said Waymo is now driving more than 1 million fully autonomous miles and over 150,000 paid rides each week. That’s about 50% more than what the company announced just last quarter. Now, Waymo has about 700 cars operating across three states: California, Arizona, and Texas.

Waymo doesn’t seem to face much competition yet. Cruise, the only other company that has obtained a driverless-deployment permit in California, is not providing driverless ride-hail service to the public in the state.

In an oversubscribed fundraising round this October, Waymo said it had raised $5.6 billion in new capital, led by Alphabet and outside investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Fidelity. Bloomberg reported last week that the latest round valued Waymo at more than $45 billion — which was more than the market size of Ford and the company’s partner, Hyundai.

Still, the success of Waymo begs a reality check. Uber racks up millions of rides every hour globally, and it dominates the US ride-hailing market with more than three-quarters of market share. The company is also now profitable. Alphabet’s so-called “other bets,” which include Waymo and other subsidiaries, lost $1.12 billion in Q3 2024, though less than the $1.19 billion in Q3 2023.

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