Inside the robotaxi lobbying war: Waymo and Uber press opposite visions on Washington

Waymo and Uber are now spending in near-parity in Washington. The dollar totals are the easy part: Waymo, the driverless unit of Google parent Alphabet, spent slightly more than $2 million on federal lobbying in the first half of 2026, up about 93% from a year earlier, according to LDA filings first surfaced by Ars Technica. What the filings show is the next phase of a contest over who writes the rules for fully self-driving taxi service, a category the industry calls robotaxis, where no human driver sits behind the wheel.

The two firms have staked out opposite visions of how that service should reach US streets, and the spending pattern is now an early map of how the fight will play out. Waymo is pressing for a faster federal route to fully driverless commercial service, while Uber is advocating a staggered rollout that keeps human drivers in the mix alongside robotaxis for the foreseeable future. The dollar gap between them has collapsed, and the policy gap has not.

The latest data point is Waymo's second quarter. Between April and June 2026, the company reported spending more than $1 million on federal lobbying, more than double its outlay in the same quarter a year earlier, according to the filing. The 93% year-over-year jump puts Waymo close to Uber's federal outlay and well ahead of Amazon's Zoox and Tesla, with the May 2026 Greenberg Traurig hire landing in the same window the FT reported Waymo was weighing an exit from the Austin and Atlanta partnership.

In May 2026, Waymo hired the law firm Greenberg Traurig to lobby on its behalf, adding to a roster of several other Washington firms already on its account. The hire landed alongside reports from the Financial Times, picked up by Ars Technica, that Waymo was exploring options to exit the Austin and Atlanta service it runs through Uber's app. A public policy fight and a private partnership fracture are now running on the same clock.

The two companies are arguing from incompatible bets about the future fleet. Waymo's version is a fully driverless service, with no human safety operator in the front seat, scaled as fast as regulators will allow. Uber's version is a mixed fleet of robotaxis and human-driven cars sharing a single ride-hailing app, on the theory that regulators and the public will not accept the fully driverless step on Waymo's timetable. The two bets cannot both become the rule.

The lobbying fight is already spilling beyond Washington. Both companies are working state capitals after pushback stalled expansion into New York and Chicago. Politico Influence reported in late July that a string of high-profile Waymo vehicle incidents, what the newsletter called "Waymo meltdowns," had revived the AV lobbying fight at the state level, giving critics a fresh line of attack on driverless deployment. CNBC reported on August 1 that the labor question, what happens to the drivers whose jobs a fully driverless fleet would eventually displace, has become a fault line inside the broader Uber-Waymo split, and that Uber is leaning into it as a way to distinguish its position from Waymo's.

The collision was already visible in mid-July, when TechCrunch reported that both firms were stepping up their federal presence and pushing against each other on the underlying rollout question. Walter Piecyk, an analyst at LightShed Partners, attributed the intensification of the rivalry to exactly that dynamic: two firms spending against each other in Washington on opposite policy visions, at the same time their own partnership is fraying in Austin and Atlanta.

Waymo added a second major outside lobbying firm in May 2026, raised its first-half outlay by 93%, and began exploring a partnership exit in the same cities where that partnership runs on Uber's app, all in the same window. The sequence points in the same direction: the Greenberg Traurig hire, the spending jump, and the FT-reported exit talks are all in the same window.

The contest now has a date attached. The second-quarter lobbying window closed on June 30. The next set of disclosures, covering July through September, will be the first public read on whether the spending pattern holds into the back half of 2026, and on whether the Austin and Atlanta partnership is still a partnership by the time those numbers land.