The blackout on Saturday was the kind of event that autonomous-driving companies spend years trying to prevent. A large power outage rolled across San Francisco, traffic signals went dark across the city, and Waymo, the robotaxi operator owned by Google parent Alphabet, pulled its cars off the streets. Service was suspended for about an hour and then resumed, the company said, as the city’s infrastructure came back online.
Waymo described the pause as proactive and precautionary. With intersections unmanaged and public trust on the line, the company chose to stop rather than push its cars through intersections with no signals and no predictable right of way. It was, according to industry analysts, the first time an autonomous vehicle fleet has been taken offline because of a city infrastructure failure.
The episode highlights how much robotaxis depend on the physical world around them. Autonomous systems handle vehicles, pedestrians, and signage well; they are only as good as the signals, the power, and the network the city provides. When those fail, the safest option is often to do nothing at all, and Waymo’s hour-long pause is a case study in that discipline. Regulators have pressed the industry on how it handles edge cases; this was one, and the company said service returned to normal once signals were restored.
The rest of the week was busy in a different way. In Brussels, Google and Apple jointly objected to proposed European rules on AI assistants, according to people familiar with the matter. The dispute turns on whether AI assistants must open their interfaces to third parties, a requirement the two companies say would create security risks and weaken their products. European regulators have proposed interoperability obligations as part of their push to keep digital markets contestable, and the companies have lodged formal objections while continuing to negotiate.
In Washington, a federal court handed Google a mixed outcome in the long-running search case. The court affirmed that Google holds a monopoly in search but rejected the government’s proposed breakup, allowing the company to keep Chrome and Android under its control. Analysts said the outcome was far lighter than the market had priced in, and it removes, for now, the threat that the company’s most valuable assets would be carved out and sold. The decision leaves Google’s search business intact and ends, at least in this round, the most aggressive remedy the government had sought.
For Alphabet, the week condensed the range of pressures the company now faces. Brussels wants to regulate the products it builds. Washington has decided it is a monopolist but has chosen not to break it up. And San Francisco showed that even the most advanced autonomous fleet depends on municipal infrastructure it does not control. Each front is governed by different rules, different timelines, and different stakeholders, and the company must fight them all at once.
The EU fight may matter most over the long run. AI assistants are becoming the next interface to the internet, and regulators in Brussels have made clear they intend to keep them open, the way they forced browsers and app stores to be in earlier fights. If assistant interoperability becomes law, it will shape how every company’s assistant connects to others’ services, with consequences for search, commerce, and advertising that extend well beyond Europe. Google has argued that opening its assistant to third parties would force it to expose internal systems, a position Apple shares on its own devices.
The antitrust ruling, by contrast, buys time. Google keeps Chrome, the browser that feeds its search business, and Android, the operating system that distributes its apps. Analysts said the outcome, while not a clean victory, removes the worst-case scenario that investors had modeled, and it gives the company room to focus on the competitive threats that matter more than regulation: AI assistants that answer questions without a search engine behind them.
Waymo’s hour, in the end, may be the most instructive piece of the week. The robotaxi industry is racing to expand, and every city it enters brings new infrastructure with new failure modes. San Francisco, Waymo’s home market, is where it has learned the hardest lessons, from traffic jams at festivals to emergency vehicles, and Saturday’s blackout added one more: the cars are ready; the cities are not always. The company has said it plans to expand to more cities this year, and each one will test the same dependence on power, signals, and networks.
Google will fight the EU rules, manage the antitrust aftermath, and continue expanding Waymo. But the week showed that its risks now run from the halls of Brussels to the traffic lights of San Francisco, and no single victory settles any of them. The market’s reaction to the antitrust ruling was relief; the reaction to the blackout was curiosity. Both are responses to the same company trying to run an empire of services on top of a physical world it does not control.
