In a revelation that adds a rather large asterisk to the definition of “autonomous,” Waymo’s Chief Safety Officer, Dr Mauricio Peña, has confirmed during a US Senate hearing that the firm relies on remote human operators based in the Philippines to assist its vehicles on American roads. When a Waymo robotaxi finds itself a bit stumped by a “difficult driving situation,” it effectively “phones a friend” thousands of miles away for a steer.
Peña was quick to clarify that these operators—whom Waymo calls “fleet response agents”—do not actually “drive” the vehicles via remote control, but instead “provide guidance” as an additional data point. However, the admission immediately drew fire from lawmakers like Senator Ed Markey, who raised the alarm over cybersecurity vulnerabilities, latency issues, and the safety implications of having “long-distance backseat drivers” influencing vehicles in real-time. When pressed, Peña was unable to provide a breakdown of how many operators were based overseas compared to those in the US.
Testifying at the same hearing, Tesla, Inc. pitched a radically different security philosophy. Lars Moravy, Tesla’s VP of Vehicle Engineering, stated unequivocally that the company’s core driving controls sit on a physically and digitally separate layer that “cannot be accessed from outside the vehicle.” He asserted that firmware updates require a rigorous two-person cryptographic sign-off and claimed that no one has ever successfully hijacked a Tesla’s driving systems remotely.
Why does this matter?
This hearing has shone a spotlight on two very different paths in the race to full autonomy. Waymo’s “human-in-the-loop” approach, which leans on a global remote workforce, offers a practical way to handle “edge cases” and scale its service quickly. However, it also opens a right Pandora’s box of potential security risks and calls into question the very nature of its autonomy. A system that requires a lifeline to a human operator 8,000 miles away feels less like a self-driving revolution and more like the world’s most sophisticated remote-control toy.
Tesla, on the other hand, is betting the farm on a hardened, self-contained system. This architecture prioritises security by creating an air gap around critical driving functions, but it also means the AI must solve virtually every problem on its own, without a safety net. While Tesla claims this makes its vehicles unhackable from the outside, it places immense pressure on the capabilities of its onboard AI. The industry is now watching to see which philosophy will prevail: the globally-networked assistant or the isolated, self-reliant machine.
