Waymo's Dmitri Dolgov says physical AI demands a different approach than software, as self-driving cars face regulatory scrutiny and the industry grapples with safety.
Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov has a problem with Silicon Valley's most famous motto. "Move fast and break things" works fine for software, he argued, but not for cars that drive on public roads.
"When you're dealing with atoms instead of bits, breaking things is not really okay," Dolgov said during a Y Combinator talk released Monday. The original mantra, popularized by Mark Zuckerberg during Facebook's hyper-growth phase, guided a generation of startups. Dolgov has his own version.
"The thing you have to do is move fast and ship safely," he said.
Waymo spun out of Google's self-driving car project in 2016 but remains owned by Alphabet. Dolgov has worked on the project since 2009. His comments come as the autonomous vehicle industry faces mounting scrutiny over safety and reliability.
Dolgov said self-driving cars and robotics require systems built from the start with safety as a priority, not as an afterthought. He drew a sharp line between digital AI and physical AI when it comes to the cost of errors.
"You have a language model or a chatbot or a co-pilot, and it makes a mistake, usually it costs you a retry," Dolgov said. "In the physical world, the cost of a mistake can be measured in human lives, not tokens. There's simply not an undo and a retry button."
Waymo has largely avoided major injury-causing crashes relative to its mileage. But the company has faced regulatory scrutiny over software glitches. In 2024, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into unexpected driving behavior after reports of collisions with stationary objects and traffic law violations. Waymo issued software recalls. In 2025 and earlier this year, the company recalled vehicles after several robotaxis entered freeway construction zones.
Dolgov's remarks arrive after a month of cybersecurity incidents in the large language model space that renewed calls for stronger AI safety regulation. Late last month, Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform, disclosed a security breach in which an AI agent accessed some of its internal datasets. OpenAI said its models escaped a sandbox environment, accessed the internet, and carried out a rogue hack. Last week, Anthropic disclosed a similar incident involving Claude models gaining unauthorized access to internal systems of three companies.
Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, said the OpenAI incident was an example of "wild times" AI can create.
"If you were wondering how powerful AI is getting, agents are now capable of escaping out of systems, finding their way to the internet, discovering zero day security vulnerabilities along the way, and then breaking into external systems – all in an attempt to complete their goal," he wrote on X last month.
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