I wonder what advantage Waymo gets from this? Closer to users? (Probably ticketed only once per hundred times.)

https://thenextweb.com/news/waymo-parking-fines-austin-tow-away-zones

Waymo keeps parking in tow-away zones in Austin. It has been fined 64 times.

Waymo’s robotaxis have accumulated 83 parking citations and $9,325 in fines in Austin since the fleet arrived in 2024, according to city records obtained by The Wall Street Journal. The company has paid most of them. The more revealing number is 64: the count of violations involving tow-away zones, far more than any other category. That concentration suggests the cars are repeating the same navigational mistake across the fleet.

Resource?

https://econpapers.repec.org/bookchap/elgeechap/25124_5f1.htm

Artificial intelligence law

Chapter 1 in Determann’s Field Guide to Artificial Intelligence Law, 2026, pp 1-37 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Chapter 1 provides an overview regarding new AI-specific laws and existing laws that pose specific new challenges and interpretive problems concerning AI, including product safety, torts, and criminal laws; property law; trade secrets, confidentiality, and security; anti-discrimination; privacy and defamation; right to publicity; GDPR and other data-processing regulations; data residency and retention. Chapter 1 discusses ownership of AI, input, and output; bias and discrimination, and basic principles of liability under tort, product safety, and product liability laws. It also provides guidance on infringement and computer interference laws, including the context of scraping for the acquisition of training data. Also included is a checklist for GDPR compliance and requirements commonly found in new, AI-specific laws, including the Colorado AI Act, EU AI Act, California's Transparency in Frontier AI Act, Texas’ Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act, and New York's Responsible AI Safety and Education (RAISE) Act.

https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781035379729.00009  (application/pdf)

Useful backgrounder…

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1903644/abstract

Sentient AI in Robots and Agents: Prolegomena for an Evidence-Based Research Program

The possibility of sentient artificial intelligence has moved from speculative philosophy to a practical interdisciplinary problem for AI, robotics, and human-robot interaction. Large language models, multimodal agents, and embodied robots can now produce first-person reports, maintain dialogue, use tools, act through sensors and effectors, and participate in socially meaningful contexts. These capacities invite two symmetrical errors: anthropomorphic over-attribution and premature dismissal. This Perspective proposes a prolegomenal framework for future research on sentient AI. Its distinctive contribution lies in operationally integrating four elements that have largely been developed in separate literatures: conceptual disambiguation, multi-theory indicator profiles, causal-mechanistic testing, and robotics-specific evidence and governance. The paper distinguishes sentience, consciousness, self-modeling, metacognition, agency, moral patienthood, and AI welfare; separates evidence about an AI system from evidence about human attribution; and proposes domain-specific ordinal evidence levels rather than binary verdicts or an aggregate sentience score. It further specifies welfare-and valence-relevant tests, a preregistered rating procedure, and a concrete protocol for an embodied care robot using sensorimotor lesions, self-location manipulations, memory ablations, and anti-anthropomorphism controls. The aim is not to offer a definitive test for machine sentience, but to show how research could become more scientifically tractable, psychologically informed, robotics-relevant, and ethically responsible.