Waymo getaway cars

Burglary in the age of agentic AI

My grandmother heard John Dillinger before she saw him. She was on a street corner in East Chicago, Indiana in 1934 when the shooting started outside the First National Bank. Dillinger’s gang fought past police with a hostage as a human shield, killed an officer, and sped off with $20,000. She remembered that rat-a-tat-tat sound for the rest of her life.

I thought about her recently, because a thief in San Francisco just made a cleaner getaway than Dillinger ever managed, and no one heard a thing.

Someone robbed a yoga studio in San Francisco, walked out with an armful of merchandise, and climbed into a driverless Waymo idling at the curb. When the thief was inside, presumably with the seatbelt on, the car pulled away. There was no driver, no chase, no witnesses. And… six months later, no suspect.

What we know to be true: a Waymo is basically a rolling surveillance system. The cars are riddled with cameras and sensors. To summon one, you need an account registered to an app on your phone, and you need a valid credit card payment on file. So this should have been an easy solve for the local police.

Instead, by the time the police got their warrant, the interior video was gone, the exterior faces had already been blurred for privacy, and the company reserved the right to push back on law enforcement to protect its riders.

The most surveilled getaway in the city’s history produced no one to arrest.

I suppose this is a win for privacy as we’re all increasingly surveilled. I’m still wondering whether this was a new form of physical AI penetration testing – someone testing the limits of security in an AI-mediated real world.

That said, we ought to think about how privacy might shield bad actors in the future. My grandmother was one of the witnesses in 1934. Today the witness is a corporation, and the record of what happened lives on its servers, under its retention schedule, released through its lawyers. Dillinger used a human shield. This thief used a privacy policy.

We assumed a city full of cameras would end anonymity. It may do the opposite: anonymity for whoever the platform decides to protect, and only for as long as the footage survives.