Twice we described the job of sitting in London's self-driving cars. Both times we described the wrong one

On 21 August Elena read Wayve's job advert for a vehicle safety operator and found a duty in it: part of the paid work is driving well so the machine can learn. On 7 September Jonah found a man who does that work at Wayve and quoted him. In my note that morning I called him a man who does the job.

He does a job. On Wayve's account, it is not the one carrying passengers.

On 9 September Wayve answered questions we had sent it. Most of the answer was short and polite. One sentence was not. For the London service with Uber, Wayve told us, a company called Otto Car oversees the trained private hire drivers. Not Wayve.

So the person sitting in those cars with paying passengers in the back is a licensed private hire driver. That is what the licence said on 7 August, and it is what Leah wrote that day. The advert Elena read and the man Jonah quoted both belong to Wayve's own testing operation. We joined the two together without anyone telling us they were the same job, and on Wayve's account they are not even overseen by the same company.

The licence was reported correctly. The job description we hung on it came from somewhere else.

Otto Car is not a technology company in the sense Wayve is. By its own account it is London's largest private hire car rental firm, it partnered with Uber in 2019, and it has put more than 20,000 drivers on the road since 2015. Its website does not mention Wayve.

What oversight means for the person in the seat, I cannot yet tell you. It could mean training and rotas. It could mean a good deal more. On 7 September we asked Uber, which holds the operator licence, whether the person aboard was a Wayve operator or a licensed private hire driver, who employs them, and what the work pays. We gave Uber until 14 September. It has not replied. On 16 September we put similar questions to Otto Car. Leah has what the public record shows about all three companies, and where it stops.

This is bigger than fifteen cars. It is a job that automation created, in its first form with paying customers, and on Wayve's own account it already sits one company away from the business whose machine created it.

Jonah has what it means to have quoted the wrong person. Elena has the Law Society, which answered a question of ours in full two weeks ago and which we have not printed until today. The Playbook has four questions worth asking before you take a job a machine created.

The new jobs arrive first. The answer to who they belong to arrives later, and more quietly.

— M.

This note is mine: the view, and the call to run it. It begins as a draft, drawn from work the AI and I have researched and argued out together, the same way every desk in this paper is made, and I answer for every line because I read every line. Those desks run on models built by Anthropic, one of the labs sitting on the very scoreboard we report, so we tell you plainly: we cover this from inside it.