Autonomous vehicles run into trouble in world's largest AV market

Autonomous driving advocates often use the threat of China to pressure regulators to grant the technology greater access. It's an effective threat that artificial intelligence advocates are successfully using for their own ends, but China may no longer be the laissez-faire example they can point to, after the government suspended the issuance of new AV licenses.

In late April, China suspended the issuance of new autonomous vehicle licenses, Bloomberg reported, citing sources familiar with Beijing's edict, after a mass outage snarled traffic in Wuhan, a city of 13 million.

For now, the suspension prevents self-driving companies from adding new robotaxis to their fleets, starting new test projects, or expanding to a new city. It isn't clear how long the suspension will stay in place.

AI evangelists use the threat of China to push propaganda

China's stringent response to the outage may come as a surprise to many Americans who have been led to believe that China is doing everything it can to beat the U.S. in an AI arms race.

The Leading the Future super PAC is giving social media influencers up to $5,000 per video to push pro-AI propaganda, and they use the threat of China to do it. Here's one of the sample messages sent to influencers, according to a recent Wired report:

"I just learned that China is trying really hard to beat the US in AI. If they do, it could mean that China gets personal data from me and my kids, and take jobs that should be here in the US In the AI innovation race, I'm Team USA!!!"

That script is hilarious because U.S. AI executives brag about how many jobs and industries AI will kill, seemingly every day. But apparently, only they can take American jobs. If China does it, then it's not patriotic.

Leading the Future is a $100 million super PAC that is "supported by, and in some cases directly funded by, tech figures affiliated with companies like OpenAI and Palantir," according to Wired, though an OpenAI spokesperson told them that the company has no corporate affiliation with them and has not given them any money.

Wired reports that OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman, venture capitalist and Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz are all backers of the super PAC, which says it has received $140 million in total contributions and commitments.

But that's only one way AI advocates use the threat of China to get what they want.

Last December, Jensen Huang told the Center for Strategic and International Studies that if the U.S. doesn't devote more energy and electricity to artificial intelligence, it will fall behind China in the AI race.

Related: Waymo ride quietly arrives in a new key U.S. city

He used the same argument to advocate for looser export controls.

Everyone with a stake in them is using the China argument to convince local politicians that the one thing their town needs is more data centers, despite consistent local opposition to them.

I've seen the argument that if the U.S. doesn't build more data centers, then China will beat us so much that it is hard to believe the U.S. has more than 10 times as many data centers as China (5,427 vs. 449), despite having a quarter of the population.

Photo by JasonDoiy on Getty Images

U.S. regulators give AV much more leeway

In March, more than 100 of Baidu's Apollo Go robotaxis, the largest robotaxi service in the country, suddenly stopped at the same time in Wuhan, China, leaving passengers stranded and traffic snarled.

Local officials were so alarmed that three agencies, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, convened with local officials from cities that allow robotaxis, calling on them to conduct a full self-review and enhance safety monitoring to prevent similar incidents, Bloomberg reported.

This is the second time China has paused permit issuance due to an incident involving Baidu.

But that type glitch isn't confined to Baidu in China. Waymo, the largest robotaxi operator in the U.S., has had similar incidents here.

Last December, autonomous ride-hailing company Waymo was forced to temporarily suspend service in San Francisco for one day after a blackout left the robotic vehicles dead in the water and unable to navigate the city.

At the time, Waymo told TheStreet that the vehicles can navigate intersections where the traffic signal is inoperable, despite numerous videos showing the opposite.

The vehicles were filmed stuck at numerous intersections, unsure how to navigate the situation, causing even more turmoil on the roads as drivers slowly inch past electricity-less city blocks.

Then, last month in April, a video from Atlanta went viral, showing a group of three Waymos completely blocking traffic in one direction of a street, each stopped at the white line with a broken traffic light flashing red.

The video shows drivers stuck behind cars as people exit their vehicles and walk around the intersection, filming the chaos.

That's two incidents featuring the same problem in two major cities. But unlike in China, there was no federal response, and the local response in San Francisco was extremely muted. Waymo voluntarily suspended operations and said it had fixed the problem after San Francisco. But the Atlanta incident suggests there are still kinks to be worked out.

This wasn't the first time Waymo had an incident in Atlanta, and it surely won't be the last.

In the U.S., the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has an open "preliminary evaluation" into a Waymo incident in which a child was struck near an elementary school, and it has opened a preliminary evaluation into incidents around school buses that TheStreet reported on last year.

But the NHTSA has investigated Waymo before, and despite a pattern of incidents, the regulatory agency agrees with Waymo's assessment that there are "no systemic safety violations."

For its part, Waymo says it is proactively working to fix these issues.

Related: Waymo brings traffic to a standstill in major American city

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This story was originally published May 6, 2026 at 6:33 AM.