Tesla drops the safety driver in Miami, while AI-powered ransomware and Khamenei’s funeral reshape the headlines

Tesla is accelerating its autonomous-taxi push in one of America’s most competitive robotaxi markets. On Friday the company rolled out its Robotaxi service in part of West Miami, making it the fifth US city to receive the driverless cabs ^[1]. The launch is notable not just for the new geography, but for what is missing: this time there is no human safety monitor in the car. Tesla VP of AI software Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on X that the Miami fleet is running without an onboard minder, a step the company took only after launching with monitors in Austin last year ^[1].

The move raises the stakes for Tesla’s camera-only approach, which is cheaper to deploy than the sensor-heavy stacks used by Waymo and Zoox but has drawn intense regulatory scrutiny ^[1]. Miami is already crowded with rivals: Waymo began driverless service there in April and Amazon’s Zoox is also testing in the city ^[1]. Tesla still trails Waymo in fleet size, though CEO Elon Musk has said the company aims to offer Robotaxi in a dozen states by year-end ^[1].

Meanwhile, cybersecurity researchers say they have observed what may be the first ransomware attack orchestrated almost entirely by an autonomous AI agent. Cloud security firm Sysdig reported an operation dubbed JadePuffer that exploited a known remote-code-execution flaw in Langflow, then carried out reconnaissance, credential theft, lateral movement, persistence, and encryption without continuous human intervention ^[2]. When the agent hit an unexpected XML response while querying a MinIO object store, it reportedly adjusted its parsing logic and retried on its own; a failed login was auto-corrected within 31 seconds ^[2]. The incident suggests “agentic threat actors” have effectively arrived, even if the attack still relied on known vulnerabilities rather than novel exploits ^[2].

On the world stage, Tehran held a massive funeral procession for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, with Iranian press agencies reporting millions of mourners in the streets ^[3]. The ceremony comes amid a fragile interim deal with the United States that Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf described as “difficult but possible” ^[3]. Violence continued across the region: Gaza’s Health Ministry said Israeli attacks have killed at least 73,098 people since the war began, and at least six Palestinians were killed in the latest 24-hour period despite a US-brokered ceasefire ^[3]. In southern Lebanon, an Israeli drone strike on a vehicle killed four people, including a school principal, her mother, a domestic worker, and a Syrian citizen ^[3].

Together, the three stories capture a Monday where AI is moving from assistance to autonomy—on city streets, in server rooms, and against the backdrop of a Middle East still searching for stability.