GoKawiilIn early September, two teenagers got into a Waymo, but then ended up in the back of a police car. The robotaxi company said it detected “a violation of our terms of service involving a firearm,” pulled the car over, and alerted emergency services, according to the Los Angeles Times. Police arrested the passengers after allegedly finding a loaded AR-style “ghost gun” in the vehicle.
The arrests exposed a lot of unanswered questions about privacy and autonomous vehicles, including what they are recording, what they do with the footage, and how much privacy riders should expect while riding inside them.
Waymo’s camera-covered cars have already been drawn into the debate over privacy and surveillance. On a number of occasions, law enforcement agencies have obtained search warrants for footage captured by its cars, according to Bloomberg. Last year, the LAPD obtained footage of a hit-and-run that was recorded by a nearby Waymo vehicle. During anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, five Waymos were vandalized and set on fire amid questions about whether the vehicles could be capturing images of protesters that might be used as evidence to identify or arrest them. Waymo does not publicly disclose how many law enforcement requests it receives or how often it complies.
Those concerns echo the backlash against Flock’s network of automated license-plate readers, which have given police the ability to track cars across jurisdictions and have prompted growing fears about government surveillance and misuse. Unlike fixed Flock cameras, Waymos move through cities carrying cameras both outside and inside their vehicles.
Waymo Ojai autonomous robotaxi travels through the Fourth and Howard streets intersection outside Moscone West, which displays banners for the 2026 Pokemon World Championships, San Francisco, California, August 20, 2026. Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
The latest case of the arrested teens takes those concerns a step further. Police did not approach Waymo after a crime looking for footage its cameras happened to capture. Waymo detected something inside the car and initiated the police response itself.
Waymo spokesperson Julia Ilina told The Verge in an email that the company uses its internal cameras to help enforce its terms of service, including detecting prohibited items and behavior. She said it uses automated technology to help Waymo’s teams identify potential violations, such as the presence of firearms inside the vehicle. “If Waymo detects a firearm in the vehicle, we may reach out to local law enforcement,” she added.
Waymo did not explain how its automated system determines whether something may be a firearm, how confident it has to be before something gets flagged, what role humans play between an automated alert and a call to police, or what other violations of its terms of service might prompt a police response. Those are important omissions. This wasn’t a human taxi driver deciding to call 911. It was a driverless car, equipped with cameras and an AI brain, escalating a situation involving its passengers to police.
Bob Somers, a former engineer at autonomous vehicle company Zoox and technical adviser to the AV-safety nonprofit SAVE-US, said he would expect Waymo’s system to look for a range of potentially dangerous weapons and behaviors. The software may not need to decide with certainty that it has seen a firearm. It could instead flag something that resembles one for further review, he said.
“If there is a certain set of objects detected, then that would probably loop in a remote operator to take a look at what’s going on,” Somers said.
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