The End of Geopolitical Arbitrage: Why Uber and Lyft Can No Longer Straddle the Divide

This Week in the Autonomy Economy, geopolitics stood front and center, ZYT which was spun out of DJI announced plans to expand into autonomous trucking, while the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office deployed an autonomous patrol vehicle for the first time.

There is never a dull moment in the autonomy economy. While the last seven days were defined by statecraft, the coming week’s news flow should be dominated by CES, though the unfolding situation in Venezuela may continue to overshadow the convention floor.

The autonomy economy is global and interconnected in ways that are often overlooked. The common denominator is one that isn't discussed enough in the tech community, oil. Oil powers over 90% of global transportation and nearly all of shipping.

It underpins entire economies. When a nation dependent on oil imports at an effective discount of $8–$12 barrel suddenly loses that lifeline overnight, the result is an economic shock that can trigger social unrest.

The autonomy supply chain is powered by oil, which is why Dr. Dean Foreman, Chief Economist of the Texas Oil & Gas Association joins us each and every quarter on The Road to Autonomy podcast. He will once again join us in a few weeks to unpack the impact of non-sanctioned Venezuelan heavy crude entering the market.

As we head to Las Vegas next week, keep this context in mind. The shiny demos at CES will show us what is technically possible, but the geopolitical shifts in Caracas remind us what is economically sustainable.

The Autonomy Economy does not exist in a vacuum; it floats on a sea of commodities, capital, and treaties. When those tides turn, the entire stack moves with them. See you at CES.

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WHAT’S MOVING THE MARKETS | GEOPOLITICS

How the Fall of Maduro Exposed Uber and Lyft in London

Nicolás Maduro's capture on January 3rd didn't just redraft the map of South America, it severed a critical artery of the Chinese economy. Until yesterday, China purchased roughly 76% of Venezuela’s oil output in 2025 at discounts averaging $8–12 per barrel below market rates according to CNBC.

That arbitrage didn't just insulate China from global energy volatility; it effectively underwrote the aggressive subsidization behind their Autonomous Belt & Road Initiative. Combined with U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities in June 2025, which set Tehran's program back years and left the regime facing economic paralysis, China now faces a two-front energy crisis.

The discount buffer financing the country’s global autonomy economy expansion, including robotaxis has now evaporated. But while the economic decoupling is driven by oil, the ideological decoupling is being driven by a much faster, sharper phenomenon, the collapse of the neutral ground startup strategy.

The most vivid proof that the middle path is closed isn't found in a policy paper, but in an empty office in Beijing. As most recently as August, the Beijing headquarters of Manus, the AI agent startup once hailed as "China's answer to DeepSeek" was quiet, according to reporting from The Financial Times.

Its desks were empty, its local staff largely laid off, and its Chinese social media presence wiped clean. Just months prior, Manus AI was the breakout star of China's AI boom, with access codes selling for thousands of yuan on Alibaba's Xianyu platform.

But behind the scenes, the founders made a binary choice, they abandoned China for Singapore to secure a $75 million investment led by U.S. venture firm Benchmark. The move was intended to bypass restrictions in a move commonly known as a Singapore-wash to access Western capital.

Instead, it sparked a firestorm. In China, reactions ranged from celebration to accusations of defection, while in Washington, the deal triggered a review by the U.S. Treasury Department. As one former security official noted to The Financial Times: "The signal is that the door will close."

Ultimately, Manus found it’s exit, when Meta acquired the company for $2 billion for the team and technology in late December, but the price of that success was total severance from China. Operations were discontinued, ownership interests eliminated, and social media footprints erased.

The casualty wasn't the company. It was the idea that startups can serve both markets simultaneously. The driver for this exodus is simple math. As Manus co-founder Xiao Hong admitted on a podcast earlier in the year, the willingness to pay for software is "five times higher overseas."

Combined with the currency exchange rate, he calculated a "35-times larger market" outside China. "It used to be that you could build for both China and the world," one Beijing investor lamented. "That's increasingly no longer possible. You have to choose one."

This brings us to the strategic dilemma currently facing Uber and Lyft in the UK and Europe. Their plan to deploy Baidu's RT6 robotaxis in London this year parallels the Manus strategy by attempting to leverage a third-party jurisdiction to commercially deploy Chinese technology while insulating it from U.S. geopolitical friction.

The Manus precedent suggests regulatory bodies are increasingly looking past legal domiciles to the origin of the technology itself. If relocating a software headquarters to Singapore was insufficient to shield a startup from U.S. scrutiny, a London-based fleet relying on Chinese hardware will face similar headwinds. The distinction between a corporate base and technological origin is eroding.

For U.S. platforms Uber and Lyft, this creates profound risk. As Alex Ferrara of Bessemer Venture Partners noted in the Financial Times recently, "these cars are essentially mobile AI supercomputers. Under the control of an adversarial government, they are surveillance assets first, transport second."

The relevant historical parallel is Huawei. Like Baidu today, Huawei was once a cost-effective, widely used supplier in Western infrastructure, until the security consensus shifted overnight.

Lyft's current assurances regarding data privacy mirror the arguments European telecom carriers made prior to the exclusion of Chinese 5G gear. As the Manus case illustrates, even proactive compliance efforts may not shield platforms from regulatory pressure.

The London Loophole as we are calling it, is closing. With Waymo planning its own London launch in the same 2026 window, the market is presenting a stark contrast between Western-aligned and China-dependent approaches to deploying robotaxis.

The fall of Maduro raised the economic cost of China's Autonomous Belt & Road Initiative, the Manus incident reveals the political cost of trying to bridge the divide.

Uber and Lyft are going to have choices to make as the geopolitics ramp up globally. There is no longer a neutral lane and soon companies will be forced to pick sides.

Our Take: The era of geopolitical neutrality is officially over. For a decade, tech companies operated under the assumption that they could decouple their supply chains from ideology. The fall of Maduro and the Manus exit prove that capital and code now have a nationality. The London Loophole is no longer a strategy, but a liability.

Companies Mentioned: $UBER ( ▲ 1.62% ), $LYFT ( ▼ 1.02% ), $BIDU ( ▼ 3.78% ) 

ADVOCATING FOR THE AUTONOMY ECONOMY | SPONSORED

Automation and autonomy will strengthen the economy, create jobs, and reduce inflation. Council for Economic Resilience is dedicated to promoting the future of autonomy and automation for the benefit of the American public.

Council for Economic Resilience, Inc. is a 501(c)4 Advocacy Group

PIQUING OUR INTEREST

Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office Deploys Autonomous Vehicle Miami-Dade's Sheriff's Department has deployed an autonomous police vehicle with a safety driver, with the goal of transitioning to fully autonomous patrol vehicle in the future.

DJI Spin-Out, ZYT Expands into Autonomous Trucking ZYT is planning to develop autonomous trucks in China as the company expands from purely developing low-power autonomous vehicle technology.

📰 Before these stories were featured here, they were available on X. Follow @RoadToAutonomy today to stay up-to-date on the latest news and developments shaping the autonomy economy.

SOCIAL BUZZ | AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

FSD Goes Coast to Coast with No Interventions

David Moss, a Tesla owner and LiDAR salesman, left the Tesla diner in Los Angeles on December 29th and completed a 2,734-mile journey in a Tesla Model 3 to Myrtle Beach, SC without once touching the wheel.

While we do not have independent data to verify the claim, you can view David's FSD stats here and they do confirm the journey was completed without any interventions.

Our take: This journey validates our thesis that Tesla will crack Unsupervised FSD sooner rather than later. After extensive testing of FSD 14.2.2.2 over the past week, the trajectory is unmistakable. The gap between supervised and unsupervised is narrowing faster than the non-Tesla fan market appreciates.

Companies Mentioned: $TSLA ( ▲ 0.9% ) 

Tesla is currently ranked #1 with a bullish outlook on the AUTONOMY LEADERBOARD in the personally owned autonomous vehicles category.

THE ROAD TO AUTONOMY PODCAST

How the Permian Basin is Accelerating Kodiak’s Commercialization Plans

(December 30, 2025) Pete Bigelow, Public Relations Manager, Kodiak joined Grayson Brulte on The Road to Autonomy podcast to discuss his firsthand experience in the Permian Basin and how the region acts as a “literal and figurative sandbox” for autonomous trucking.

Watch on YouTube | Spotify | X

Companies Mentioned: $KDK ( ▲ 4.37% ) 

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