Welcome back. This week in tech: General Motors says goodbye to robotaxis but not self-driving cars; one woman’s fight to keep AI out of applications for housing; Salt Typhoon; and tech’s donations to Donald Trump. Thank you for joining me.
GM shuts down Cruise robotaxis; Uber restarts robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi
When God shuts down one robotaxi business, he resurrects another. Last week, General Motors announced it would stop funding its subsidiary Cruise, which made self-driving car software and operated a robotaxi service. The unit had been a leader in autonomous vehicles until a near-fatal crash in late 2023, when a Cruise car hit a pedestrian and dragged her along the road underneath its chassis. Cruise was once on par with Google’s Waymo in its presence in San Francisco, but the accident incited regulators to force Cruise’s fleet of vehicles from the streets. The GM business later submitted a false report about the incident to regulators, complicating its attempted return. The division was a money sink for GM, ingesting some $10bn since 2016 and never returning a profit. That’s about the same as Apple invested into its ill-starred self-driving car, nixed early this year.
The ex-Cruise chief executive, Kyle Vogt, had said his company would earn $1bn in revenue in 2025, but the business never made it there. He was quite mad in the wake of GM’s decision, posting on X: “In case it was unclear before, it is clear now: GM are a bunch of dummies.”
Cruise’s trajectory mirrors that of Uber, which shuttered its robotaxi business in 2020 after one of its cars killed a pedestrian in Arizona. Since then, Uber has adopted a different strategy in the self-driving niche, opting instead of a maker to become a distributor. When I visited San Francisco last month and rode in Waymo robotaxis, I ordered them via the Uber app and Waymo’s own. Waymo seems to be not only succeeding in the city by the Bay but expanding: it announced it would start service in Miami in 2026 two weeks ago; shares in Uber and Lyft slumped upon the news. Just before Cruise announced its demise, Uber publicized a new partnership with the Chinese autonomous vehicle maker WeRide in Abu Dhabi. WeRide makes the cars, Uber sends them your way.
Like Uber, Cruise’s death is not the end of General Motors’ self-driving efforts. The automaker said it would focus its efforts on Super Cruise, which is not a part of Cruise the business, but rather a driver-assistance software available in GM cars purchased individually.
GM now says it wants to eventually sell self-driving cars to individuals. That may be a tough sell. It would take hundreds of rides in a robotaxi to convince someone they might want to own one. The more likely outcome will be a normal car that has a self-driving mode, not unlike a Tesla with its full self-driving feature, although that system’s effectiveness has been called into serious question by US regulators for its involvement in multiple fatal crashes. Unlike Cruise, Elon Musk’s company enjoys extreme brand loyalty, so much so that some owners seem willing to overlook the deaths of others.
In a tack opposite GM, Tesla announced a robotaxi in October. Musk boasts a serious advantage over competitors: the ear of Donald Trump. Per Reuters, Trump’s transition team has already recommended doing away with a requirement that companies operating autonomous vehicles report their cars’ crashes. Tesla has argued its cars have become an unfair target of the mandate. Musk has advocated for federal laws that uniformly govern autonomous vehicles rather than a state-by-state patchwork of statutes, yet out of the other side of his mouth, he is pushing for federal deregulation.
My brother is fond of saying that our grandkids will incredulously ask us: “You drove the death machine?” That is to say, it may some day become unbelievable that anyone ever steered a car from points A to B themselves. How that future arrives at point B, however, is not obvious. With Cruise’s pivot, we see two differing visions of our self-driving future. Will we all be ferried around in a fleet owned by a company, a sort of privatized public transportation? Or will we each be encased in our own personal vehicles, self-driven around in our own bubbles à la Glinda? You might imagine that the future of Los Angeles, sprawling and dependent on personal transportation, may be different from London, where Waymos might become more like black cabs. You might also imagine a Los Angeles that requires fewer parking lots if autonomous vehicles could drop us off and drive away without needing a resting place.
One woman’s fight against AI in housing
Artificial intelligence is not all robot chess matches and bizarro fake images. It’s creeping into fundamental areas of life: medicine, employment, policing and housing. One woman in the US encountered a particularly blunt assessment of her financial history when she applied for an apartment in 2021: “Mary, we regret to inform you that the third party service we utilize to screen all prospective tenants has denied your tenancy,” the email read. “Unfortunately, the service’s SafeRent tenancy score was lower than is permissible under our tenancy standards.”
Mary Louis sued. Two years into the class action suit, the company that generated her too-low score, SafeRent, has accepted a settlement. Unusually, the legal agreement involved changes to its core product and a pledge to refrain from scoring future tenants via AI. It’s a rare victory. My colleague Johana Bhuiyan reports:
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Tenant-screening systems like SafeRent are often used in place of humans as a way to ‘avoid engaging’ directly with the applicants and pass the blame for a denial to a computer system, said Todd Kaplan, one of the attorneys representing Louis and the class of plaintiffs who sued the company.
The property management company told Louis the software alone decided to reject her, but the SafeRent report indicated it was the management company that set the threshold for how high someone needed to score to have their application accepted.
Louis and the other named plaintiff alleged SafeRent’s algorithm disproportionately scored Black and Hispanic renters who use housing vouchers lower than white applicants.
SafeRent has settled. In addition to making a $2.3m payment, the company has agreed to stop using a scoring system or make any kind of recommendation when it comes to prospective tenants who used housing vouchers for five years.
Read the full story on Mary Louis’s fight against SafeRent here.
Updates: Tech CEOs and Trump; Salt Typhoon
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Tech CEOs and Trump: At the end of October, I wrote about how Silicon Valley’s leaders were slyly and covertly cozying up to Trump in advance of the election. Now that he’s won, they’re doing it out in the open. Meta announced last week that it would give Trump’s inaugural fund $1m, as did Amazon. The OpenAI chief, Sam Altman, said he would make a $1m personal donation to the fund. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook have flown to Mar-a-Lago for dinners. Zuckerberg gave Trump a pair of Meta Ray-Bans, the company’s camera-enabled sunglasses. Google and Microsoft did not comment on their plans, though Google’s CEO was reported to have visited Trump as well.
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Salt Typhoon: In last week’s edition, we dived into why China hacked the world’s phone networks in a brazen and sweeping cyberattack dubbed Salt Typhoon. This week, a startling update: cell carriers like AT&T and Verizon have not notified the majority of people whose phone records were stolen in the hack, nor is there any indication that they will, per NBC. Only the powerful residents of Washington DC, whose phone networks were compromised, like the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, have been notified by the FBI. The agency has no plans to alert others, a spokesperson said last week.
