Lyft has announced a landmark partnership with Chinese tech giant Baidu to launch autonomous robotaxi services across Europe, beginning in 2026.

The collaboration marks Baidu’s first foray into the European self-driving taxi market and represents a significant leap for Lyft as it ventures outside its North American home turf.

The joint rollout will begin in Germany and the United Kingdom, contingent on regulatory approval, with Baidu’s electric RT6 robotaxis operating on Lyft’s mobility platform. The two companies plan to expand the service to thousands of vehicles across Europe in the years ahead.

Lyft’s expansion is backed by its recent $200 million acquisition of FreeNow, a European mobility app formerly co-owned by BMW and Mercedes-Benz. FreeNow has established operations in over 180 cities across nine European countries and boasts strong regulatory relationships. Lyft executives say this foundation will play a critical role in navigating Europe’s complex transportation oversight.

“What we’re excited about with FreeNow is they have a deep, long-lasting relationship with regulators, and we want to go and have those conversations about how we do this,” said Lyft Executive Vice President of Driver Experience, Jeremy Bird.

Under the partnership, Lyft will manage customer services and fleet logistics, while Baidu will supply its autonomous RT6 vehicles and technical expertise. The RT6, Baidu’s latest-generation robotaxi, is equipped with a detachable steering wheel and advanced sensors, making it well-suited for complex urban driving scenarios.

The move comes as the UK government accelerates its push to bring robotaxis to public roads, aiming to allow services with paying passengers as early as spring 2026. Germany has also taken steps to create a legislative and regulatory framework for self-driving cars, making both countries strategic entry points for autonomous mobility firms.

Baidu’s Apollo Go platform currently operates over 1,000 autonomous vehicles across 15 cities in China, having completed more than 11 million rides. While it has been experimenting with robotaxi pilots in parts of Asia and North America, the Lyft partnership represents Baidu’s first commercial push into the European market.

The timing is critical for Lyft, which has faced growing pressure to expand its autonomous capabilities amid competition from rival Uber. Uber has formed partnerships with companies like Waymo, Pony.ai, WeRide, and Momenta to prepare for robotaxi deployment in Europe, with its own services expected to launch around the same time in 2026.

In June, Uber and Waymo officially launched autonomous ride-hailing services in Atlanta, just as Tesla began testing its own low-cost driverless cars in Austin.

In July, Uber announced a sweeping new partnership with electric vehicle maker Lucid and self-driving tech startup Nuro to develop and deploy more than 20,000 robotaxis across the United States over the next six years.

Under the agreement, Uber will invest $300 million in Lucid, which will manufacture the electric robotaxis.

However, the race to establish a foothold in Europe’s emerging robotaxi sector is intensifying. Analysts say the Lyft-Baidu collaboration could be a powerful combination of operational scale and technical innovation. Baidu brings one of the most sophisticated autonomous driving stacks in the world, while Lyft leverages FreeNow’s market penetration and regulatory goodwill.

However, success will depend heavily on securing regulatory approvals and public trust, both of which remain hurdles in Europe’s tightly regulated transportation sector.

If successful, the Lyft-Baidu rollout could reshape how people in major European cities commute, giving the two companies a head start in what is shaping up to be the next frontier of urban mobility.

Perplexity AI, the rising artificial intelligence search startup often touted as a challenger to Google, is once again under fire for allegedly harvesting content from websites without consent — this time drawing sharp criticism from Cloudflare, one of the largest web infrastructure providers in the world.

According to a report published by Cloudflare, Perplexity’s web crawlers have allegedly continued to access and scrape content from websites that have explicitly opted out of such activity via tools like robots.txt files or firewall rules. The company claims Perplexity’s bots “intentionally obfuscate their identity” and engage in stealth tactics to bypass restrictions, including by masking themselves as popular web browsers like Google Chrome on macOS.

“When we blocked access to our test domains via common methods, Perplexity’s crawlers responded by changing their user-agent and IP address to continue scraping,” Cloudflare said in the report.

Cloudflare further alleges that the AI firm is exploiting rotating IP addresses and altering Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) — unique identifiers assigned to networks — to circumvent blocks and avoid detection. This stealth activity, according to Cloudflare, spanned across tens of thousands of websites and millions of requests daily.

This is not the first time Perplexity has been accused of bypassing digital boundaries. In mid-2023, the startup was caught indexing content from subscription-based and paywalled media outlets without permission. At the time, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas deflected the criticism, blaming the issue on third-party scrapers operating on the company’s behalf. But now, with Cloudflare’s claims, scrutiny over the company’s data-gathering practices has only intensified.

In response to the latest report, Perplexity spokesperson Jesse Dwyer dismissed Cloudflare’s findings as a “publicity stunt.”  He told The Verge that the blog post contained “a lot of misunderstandings.” Still, the report has prompted Cloudflare to delist Perplexity as a “verified bot” and roll out additional protections that block its scrapers by default.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, a vocal critic of unregulated AI content harvesting, recently warned of what he described as an “existential threat” to content creators and publishers from AI companies. In June, Cloudflare launched new controls allowing websites to demand payment from AI firms for data access, effectively tightening the screws on those trying to extract information without consent.

“AI crawlers have been scraping content without limits. Our goal is to put the power back in the hands of creators while still helping AI companies innovate.

“This is about safeguarding the future of a free and vibrant Internet with a new model that works for everyone,” the CEO stated.

The escalating clash between AI startups and infrastructure firms like Cloudflare comes at a time when legal questions surrounding data scraping, copyright, and consent remain unresolved. The core tension revolves around the very fuel of modern AI systems: data. With large language models hungry for ever-expanding datasets to improve performance, some companies have been accused of cutting corners in how they obtain that information.

Perplexity, founded by Srinivas and backed by Jeff Bezos and Nvidia, has positioned itself as a real-time, citation-focused search engine designed to counterbalance the dominance of Google and Bing. But its reliance on web-sourced content — including journalism — has made it a target for media companies, which have grown increasingly wary of their work being used to train AI tools without compensation.

With more publishers adding AI-blocking rules to their sites and companies like Cloudflare rolling out enforcement tools, Perplexity and its peers face growing pressure to justify how they obtain the data powering their products — and whether their methods can survive legal and reputational scrutiny.