Waymo needs some help, according to an email message the self-driving developer sent to residents of Washington, DC, on Thursday.

For more than a year, Waymo has been pushing city officials to pass new regulations allowing its robotaxis to operate in the district. So far, self-driving cars can test in the city with humans behind the wheel, but cannot operate in driver-free mode. The Alphabet subsidiary—and its lobbyists—have asked local lawmakers, including Mayor Muriel Bower and members of the city council, to create new rules allowing the tech to go truly driverless on its public roads. The company has previously said it will begin offering driverless rides in DC this year.

But Waymo’s efforts to sway officials have stalled, so the company is now asking residents to apply some pressure. “We are nearly ready to provide public Waymo rides to everyone in DC,” says an email sent to those who have signed up for Waymo’s DC service. “However, despite significant support, District leadership has not yet provided the necessary approvals for us to launch.”

The email directs recipients to contact DC officials via a form letter that says, in part: “Over the past year, I have observed Waymo vehicles operating throughout our local areas, and I am thrilled about the potential advantages this service could provide, including enhanced accessibility and a decline in traffic-related incidents.” The communication urges DC residents to edit the letter to “use your own words,” because personalized messages “have a higher impact.” Only DC residents or those with DC addresses can participate, Waymo says.

In a written statement, Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher says, “We’ll be ready to serve Washingtonians this year, and urge the Mayor, the District Department of Transportation, and the City Council to act.” The company says that 1,500 people contacted district leaders through its email in the first 90 minutes after it was sent.

Generally, self-driving vehicle developers have only launched service in places where regulations clearly outline how the tech might hit the roads. Other US cities with Waymo service, including ones in California, Florida, and Texas, already had those rules in place before the company entered their markets. But as Waymo’s ambitions have grown larger, it has begun to target large blue-state cities where autonomous vehicle tech doesn’t yet have a “driver’s license.” Earlier this month, the company said it would begin testing in Boston, where city lawmakers pushed last year for an ordinance that would ban self-driving taxis from operating without a human behind the wheel. Waymo has said that it needs Massachusetts lawmakers to “legalize fully autonomous vehicles” before it can launch service in Boston.

Eventually, self-driving-vehicle developers hope that the US Congress will pass a law allowing the broader testing and operation of their tech across the US. On Tuesday, a House committee advanced a bill that would direct the federal government to create safety standards for autonomous vehicles, and prevent states from passing their own laws prohibiting the sale or use of the tech, or from requiring companies to submit information on crashes.

Waymo’s new DC pressure campaign echoes the ones launched by transportation disrupters, including ride-hailing giant Uber and bike- and scooter-share company Bird, nearly a decade ago. Like self-driving tech developers, those companies wanted to launch their new services in places where the rules didn’t align with their business ambitions. Ultimately, Uber and Lyft generally succeeded in getting laws passed in US statehouses allowing their services to operate on public roads—and preventing cities from creating their own laws.

Today, Waymo operates in six US metro areas—Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area—and plans to launch in more than 10 this year. Three other companies, including Nuro and Amazon-owned Zoox, have permits to test self-driving tech in Washington, DC.

Many people suspect that these bots are part of an AI company’s effort to collect training data from web pages. In 2025, AI bots accounted for a significant portion of overall web traffic, which crawl the internet for text and other information to feed to data-hungry large language models.

But there are some key differences between these Chinese bots and other AI bots. First, there’s simply way more of them. King says on his website that the traffic from China and Singapore accounts for 22 percent of overall traffic, while all other AI bots account for less than 10 percent combined.

Most leading AI companies clearly identify their bots to website operators, which also makes them easier to block. The frontier AI labs are “not as interested in evading” bot-blocking rules, says Brent Maynard, senior director of security technology and strategy at the internet infrastructure company Akamai. He says AI companies usually only start trying to disguise their bots after a website shuts the front door. This wave of Chinese bots, however, disguised themselves as normal human users from the start, and they have even bypassed common bot-blocking rules, several website owners told WIRED.

Beyond AI companies, there are other businesses incentivized to scrape the internet, including search crawlers and intelligence-gathering companies.

Rising Costs and Distorted Data

The good news, at least for now, is that the bots don’t seem to have an explicitly malicious purpose. They haven’t been publicly connected to any cyberattack and don’t seem to be scanning for vulnerabilities. But the lack of a clear motive also adds to the confusion.

Some website owners are worried that the bots are scanning copyrighted material without permission. Others say the surge has forced them to pay more for bandwidth, as bot traffic crowds out human users, or to invest in more sophisticated prevention tools. The visits also skew traffic analytics, distorting reports about who is actually visiting their sites.

But the biggest impacts are felt by people who earn revenue from attracting ad clicks on their websites. “This is destroying my AdSense strategies,” says Quintero, the paranormal blog owner, “because they are saying [your website is] only visited by bots, so your content is not something that is valuable to the viewer.” As a result, websites like his may be seen as less desirable to advertisers and penalized by Google.

Makeshift Solutions

Many people have complained about the China AI bot problem in online support channels over the past few months, or sent messages about it directly to their web-hosting providers. But so far, there are still few concrete answers.

Contacted by WIRED, WordPress acknowledged that it has seen reports in recent months that some of its sites are experiencing increased traffic from suspected AI bots or scrapers. “WordPress websites have always had a great structure that makes them easy to find and be indexed by search engines. Those same capabilities make them easily crawled [by] AI as well,” the company said in an unsigned email. Google, Cloudflare, and Squarespace did not respond to requests for comment.

In recent weeks, Elon Musk has followed president Donald Trump’s lead, slamming Iranian government officials and supporting the thousands of protesters railing against the regime. He even provided free access to his Starlink satellites in the midst of a nationwide internet blackout.

But while publicly proclaiming his support of the protesters, Musk’s company X appears to be profiting from the very same government officials he railed against, potentially violating US sanctions in the process, according to a new report from the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) shared exclusively with WIRED.

TTP identified more than two dozen X accounts allegedly run by Iranian government officials, state agencies, and state-run news outlets, which display a blue check mark, indicating they have access to X’s premium service. These accounts were sharing state-sponsored propaganda at a time when ordinary Iranians had no access to the internet, and their messages appeared to be artificially boosted to increase reach and engagement, which is a key aspect of X’s premium service. An X Premium subscription, which is the only way to receive a blue check mark, costs $8 a month, while a Premium+ subscription, which removes ads and boosts reach even further, costs $40 a month.

At a time when the Trump administration is threatening Iran with possible military action if it does not meet demands related to nuclear enrichment and ballistic missiles, X appears to be undermining those efforts by providing a social media bullhorn for the Iranian government to spread its message.

“The fact that Elon Musk is not just platforming these individuals, but taking their money to boost their content through these premium subscriptions and give them extra features also means he’s undermining the sanctions that the US and the Trump administration are actually applying,” Katie Paul, the director of the TTP, tells WIRED.

X did not respond to a request for comment, but within hours of WIRED flagging several X accounts belonging to Iranian officials, their blue check marks were removed. The rest of the accounts identified by TTP but not shared with X continue to display a blue check mark.

The White House directed WIRED to the Treasury when asked for comment. A Treasury spokesperson said they do not comment on specific allegations but that it “take[s] allegations of sanctionable conduct extremely seriously.”

Protests broke out in the Iranian capital of Tehran on December 28 over the continuing devaluation of the Iranian rial against the dollar and a widespread economic crisis in the country. Over the following days, tens of thousands of protesters poured onto the streets in cities across the country, calling for regime change and the end of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s 37-year reign.

In response, the regime brutally cracked down on protesters, arresting tens of thousands of people and killing thousands more. The true death toll is still unknown but could be much higher than currently reported.

Trump signaled his support for the protesters in a post on Truth Social on January 2, promising to come to their rescue. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” he wrote. Musk quickly followed Trump, calling Khamenei “delusional.”

On January 5, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, the head of Iran’s judiciary, who had a blue check mark at the time, wrote in a post on X, “This time, we will show no mercy to the rioters.” Ejei was among the accounts whose blue check marks were removed on Wednesday after WIRED contacted the company.

A few days later, X changed the Iranian flag emoji on the platform to one used before the 1979 revolution, featuring a lion and sun. On January 14, Musk announced that anyone with a Starlink device would be free to access the internet in Iran without a subscription. At the time, Starlink devices were the only viable way of getting online after the government imposed a near-total internet blackout.