Picture a hallway in Albany. Not the marble-and-cameras part, the boring part, where a staffer with a lukewarm coffee is reading a one-pager about autonomous vehicle permitting that someone very well-paid handed them ten minutes ago. No demo rides. No self-driving Jaguar gliding down a closed course. Just paper, a schedule, and a decision that will eventually determine whether a car with nobody in the driver’s seat can legally pick you up in Brooklyn.
That hallway is where the robotaxi fight is actually happening. Waymo has doubled its lobbying spending to compete with Uber, and between them the two companies have put more than $15 million into lobbying New York politicians this year. That’s the story. Not a new sensor. Not a model update. A line item.
What this tells you about the product
I review AI tools for a living, which means I spend a lot of time separating capability from positioning. A company that believes its technology wins on merit spends money on the technology. A company that suspects the fight will be decided elsewhere spends money elsewhere. Doubling a lobbying budget is a statement about where the binding constraint sits, and both of these companies have now told us in dollars that the constraint is regulatory, not technical.
That’s not a scandal. It’s actually a reasonable read of reality. Autonomous vehicles are one of the few AI products where you cannot ship first and apologize later, because the failure mode is a person under a bumper. Regulation is the gate. Everyone knows it. So the spending makes sense.
But it does reframe how you should evaluate the marketing. When Waymo tells you its system is ready for a new city, part of what it’s describing is engineering readiness and part of what it’s describing is legal groundwork. Those are different things wearing the same coat.
The asymmetry nobody advertises
Uber and Waymo are not the same kind of company arguing for the same kind of rule, and that difference matters more than the headline number. Uber runs a network. Waymo runs a fleet with its own driving stack. A rule that makes it easy to operate an app-based ride service with third-party vehicles is not the same rule as one that makes it easy to deploy your own autonomous fleet.
Critics have accused Uber of seeking regulatory outcomes that suit its position, which is exactly what you’d expect a company to do with its own lobbying money. Waymo doubling down is the same behavior from the other direction. Two firms, two shapes of business, both writing checks to make the eventual rulebook fit their own silhouette.
The uncomfortable part for the rest of us is that the rulebook they’re shaping is the one every smaller operator has to live inside. Nobody with a good autonomous driving system and no lobbying budget gets a seat in that Albany hallway.
What I’d actually watch
If you’re trying to figure out who’s winning, the spending numbers are a lagging indicator of confidence and a leading indicator of legislation. A few things I’d track instead of the press releases:
- Whether the rules that emerge are written around specific technology or around outcomes. Outcome-based rules survive better and don’t quietly lock in whoever lobbied first.
- Which company argues for public incident data and which argues against it. That single position tells you more about a safety culture than any blog post about miles driven.
- Whether new entrants can clear the bar. If the eventual framework only works for firms with eight-figure lobbying budgets, the market has been decided before the technology was.
- What happens in states that aren’t New York. A framework designed in one expensive market has a way of becoming the template everywhere else.
The honest take
I don’t think Waymo doubling its lobbying budget is villainous. It’s a company reading its situation correctly and acting on it. Uber is doing the same. If I ran either one, I’d probably do it too.
What bugs me is the gap between how these companies talk publicly and where they put their money. The public story is about safety records, sensor stacks, and rider experience. The spending story is about who gets to write the definitions. Both stories are true. Only one of them gets a keynote.
So the next time you see a robotaxi announcement framed as a technical milestone, hold it next to the $15 million. Not because the technology is fake, but because “we can do this” and “we are now allowed to do this” are separate achievements, and companies love to blur them. The AV race is real. It’s just being run partly on a track you can’t see, in shoes the rest of us can’t afford.
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