For the past 10 years, Uber’s annual Lost & Found Index has provided a rather quirky anthropological snapshot of its riders — and even a few insights into society. The annual catalogue of millions of forgotten items ranges from mundane modern-day tools such as smartphones and laptops, to more eyebrow-raising objects like live fish, an ankle monitor, a toboggan, a package of live butterflies, and a single Louboutin shoe.

This year, Uber is using the report to highlight the same old problem of lost items with a new twist: robotaxis. Thousands of items (it’s a bit too new for millions) were left behind in robotaxis on Uber’s ride-hailing network in the past year, the company said Tuesday. There were the usual suspects of phones, keys, wallets, passports, and headphones, along with a few items that strayed into the who-is-this-rider category: a set of dentures, an “I Heart Hot Dads” bag, and a blue hat that reads “Emotional Support Human.”

Beyond this entertaining list lies a business opportunity, if a minor one. Even in a future of robot taxis, someone still has to return the things passengers leave behind.

Uber has spent the past several years locking up dozens of partnerships with autonomous vehicle (AV) technology companies. But it really wasn’t until March 2025, when the “Waymo on Uber” robotaxi service launched in Austin, that the commercial wheels on its AV business started turning. Since then, Uber and Waymo have also started a robotaxi service in Atlanta. Uber has added other AV companies to its app in the past year, including Motional in Las Vegas and Avride in Dallas, although these still have human safety operators behind the wheel.

That Uber has already logged thousands of lost items in just 12 months gives some sense of just how many robotaxi rides have been completed on its app. The underlying message here is that Uber’s existing network is already set up to reunite riders with their lost items, including a 15-pound yo-yo, one large black marble duck, a Squishmallow, and a Charli XCX poster.

When an Uber rider forgets belongings in a robotaxi, the process for recovering them is similar to any other Uber ride: open the app, click the activity tab, select the trip during which the item was lost, and contact customer support. Riders are then able to message, chat, or call a support agent. If the item is located, they have two options: pay $15 for an Uber Courier driver to provide same-day local delivery, or pick up the belonging in person from an AV depot, where the vehicles are stored and serviced.

Uber Courier is a rebrand of Uber Connect, which launched in 2020 and allowed users to send packages and personal items between local addresses. But Uber says there is more to its robotaxi support network than repurposing existing services.

“With tens of millions of lost items reported on Uber each year, we’ve spent the last decade building systems that help riders quickly and seamlessly reunite with their belongings,” Amy Satrom, global head of autonomous support at Uber, said in a statement. “As autonomous rides continue to scale on Uber, we’re bringing that same expertise to AVs — combining our fleet operations, support teams, and hybrid network to make getting a lost item back simple, even when there’s no driver behind the wheel.”

In February, the company announced Uber Autonomous Solutions, a new business division that conveys its bigger ambitions around driverless tech. The division provides companies with a suite of services that handle all the tasks associated with operating a robotaxi, self-driving truck, or sidewalk delivery robot business, including software and support services.

And Uber clearly means to make AVs a major revenue driver. The company plans to offer robotaxi rides through its app in as many as 15 cities globally by the end of the year and has said it intends to be the largest facilitator of AV trips in the world by 2029.

AI is getting expensive, and some companies are cutting back on usage in an attempt to moderate costs. That cohort includes Uber, which recently instituted internal usage caps as a way to cut down on its exorbitant AI spend.

Bloomberg reports that the company has instituted a new rule that places a monthly $1,500 cap per employee and per agentic coding tool, including Anthropic’s Claude Code or Cursor. The usage is trackable via an internal dashboard that each employee has access to, although — in certain cases — the caps can be exceeded with permission, the company says.

The news is perhaps not too surprising, since, in April, the company’s CTO revealed that the ride-sharing giant had blown through its entire annual AI budget in a matter of four months. That appears to have occurred after Uber encouraged staff to use AI “as much as possible” and even ranked their internal usage competitively on internal leader boards, The Information previously reported.

Uber’s CEO, Andrew Macdonald, also recently cast doubt on AI’s productivity impact, noting during a podcast appearance that “it’s very hard to draw a line” between AI usage and new consumer features.

Uber’s cutback raises a broader issue that the tech industry is currently facing: As enterprises pour money into AI, where exactly is the return on investment? Indeed, AI ROI has so far remained a largely theoretical phenomenon that everybody hopes will eventually materialize — although some companies are obviously getting a little restless while they wait.

The robotaxi map of Europe has been filling in city by city, and on Tuesday Madrid joined it. WeRide and Uber said they will launch what they call Spain’s first commercial robotaxi pilot in the Region of Madrid, with rides bookable through the Uber app and operations expected to begin later this year.

The launch is the companies’ first joint entry into the European market, and it arrives with the Madrid regional government, the Comunidad de Madrid, named as a partner.

The service will start with trained safety operators behind the wheel rather than empty driver’s seats. The companies say the fleet will scale “progressively,” with WeRide, Uber, and fleet operator AVOMO committed to adding hundreds of vehicles as performance milestones are met, and to expanding to fully driverless rides across core urban areas after that. No precise launch date, fleet size, or fare was disclosed.

The third name on the announcement is the one worth pausing on. AVOMO, part of the Moove Cars Group, is the company that actually runs the cars: it already operates Uber’s autonomous fleets in Austin and Atlanta, managing around 400 vehicles with a team of more than 200.

Its presence reflects WeRide’s “asset-light” strategy, in which the technology company supplies the autonomy and leaves fleet ownership and day-to-day operations to partners. “After nearly two years of close collaboration with Uber in the United States, we are entering this next phase,” said Manuel Puga, chief executive of Moove Cars Group.

For WeRide, Madrid is a fifth European market and, the company says, the fourth of 15 cities mapped out under an earlier expansion agreement with Uber, with 11 more due by 2030 and a stated ambition of tens of thousands of robotaxis worldwide. WeRide, the first publicly traded robotaxi company, holds driverless permits in eight markets and says its vehicles have run in more than 40 cities.

The Madrid plan leans heavily on its Gulf experience, where it operates commercial driverless services in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, with Riyadh expected to follow.

Uber, which sold its own self-driving division in 2020, has built its autonomy strategy almost entirely on arrangements like this one. The same partnership model underpins its Tokyo pilot with Wayve and Nissan and its tie-up with Pony.ai and Verne, whose cars became Europe’s first commercial robotaxi service in Zagreb earlier this year.

Sarfraz Maredia, Uber’s global head of autonomous mobility, called Madrid “a natural place to become a leading European market for AVs,” citing what he described as a clear regulatory path.

That regulatory path remains the variable. The announcement is studded with the language of forward-looking statements, and like every robotaxi launch in Europe so far, it is a plan contingent on approvals, milestones, and the slow business of proving the cars are safe. For now, Madrid is a date on a roadmap, with operators still in the front seats.

The ride-hailing company is betting that Germany’s automotive heartland, and a less sensor-heavy approach to autonomy, can finally make robotaxis scale in Europe.

Munich is about to become a test of a particular theory: that the cheapest way to put a driverless taxi on a European street is to stop building special cars for it. Uber said on Sunday that it will launch a robotaxi programme in the German city alongside Autobrains, an Israeli autonomy firm, with the vehicles running on Nvidia’s DRIVE Hyperion platform.

The announcement was made at Nvidia’s GTC conference in Taipei, and the deployment is contingent on German regulatory approval.

The choice of city is not incidental. Munich is the home of BMW and a dense cluster of suppliers, and it offers the mix Uber says it wants: tight inner-city streets, fast ring roads, and what the company politely calls “a thoughtful German regulatory framework.”

Germany has had federal rules permitting driverless vehicles in defined operating areas since 2021, which makes it one of the few European markets where a Level 4 service is a paperwork problem rather than a legal impossibility.

What is genuinely different here is the autonomy stack. Most robotaxis on the road today, the ones run by Waymo and its peers, depend on bespoke vehicles bristling with lidar and a single large end-to-end model trained to do everything at once.

Autobrains is selling the opposite. Its “agentic AI” breaks the driving task into specialised agents, each handling a slice of the problem, running on standard automotive sensors and ordinary automotive-grade compute. The pitch is that this is cheaper to build and easier to drop into any carmaker’s vehicle.

That last point is the commercial idea Uber keeps returning to. The three companies describe the programme as “OEM-agnostic,” meaning the software is meant to run across different manufacturers’ cars rather than a single custom fleet.

“Autonomous driving will not scale by relying on a single model to solve every driving scenario,” said Igal Raichelgauz, Autobrains’ chief executive and founder. “It requires systems that can reason, adapt, and make decisions under uncertainty.”

Uber, which sold its own self-driving unit in 2020, has spent the years since assembling exactly this kind of partnership rather than owning the technology.

It is the same template behind its Tokyo pilot with Wayve and Nissan and its tie-up with Pony.ai and Verne, whose vehicles became Europe’s first commercial robotaxi service in Zagreb earlier this year. Sarfraz Maredia, Uber’s global head of autonomous mobility, framed Munich in the same terms: the hard part, he said, “is bringing them into a commercial network where they can reliably serve riders at scale.”

Several things were left unsaid. The companies named no launch date, no fleet size, and no vehicle. They did not say which carmaker, if any, would supply the cars, nor whether early rides would carry safety operators, as they do in Zagreb.

The Munich plan also tracks a target Uber flagged last year, when it first signalled an intention to begin self-driving operations in the city, so the announcement firms up a timeline more than it sets a new one.

Europe has been the continent where robotaxis are announced more often than they are ridden. Munich is now on the list of places where that is supposed to change, pending a regulator’s signature.