Uber Technologies (UBER) is a $156 billion company today. Yesterday, Uber announced a massive, multi-year strategic partnership with Rivian to deploy up to 50,000 fully autonomous robotaxis.

Uber is committing to invest up to $1.25 billion into Rivian through 2031, starting with an initial $300 million injection. The remaining capital is tied to Rivian hitting specific autonomous performance milestones.

Uber and its fleet partners will initially purchase 10,000 fully autonomous Rivian R2 SUVs, with the option to buy up to 40,000 more starting in 2030.

Commercial deployments are scheduled to begin in San Francisco and Miami in 2028, with the goal of expanding to 25 cities across North America and Europe by 2031.

The most critical part of this deal for Uber is exclusivity. These tens of thousands of Rivian robotaxis will be available exclusively on the Uber platform. By pouring capital into Rivian (and making similar deals with players like Zoox), Uber is ensuring that even if Tesla (TSLA) and Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL) Waymo try to cut them out, Uber will still have an enormous, dedicated fleet of autonomous vehicles to offer its massive global user base.

Alphabet’s Waymo is currently the undisputed market leader in commercial robotaxis. As of early 2026, they are operating fully driverless rides in 10 major U.S. cities (including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, and Orlando). They are currently delivering around 400,000 paid rides per week and targeting 1 million weekly rides by the end of the year. While they do partner with Uber in some markets like Austin and Atlanta, they also aggregate massive demand through their own proprietary Waymo One app.

Tesla has officially launched its dedicated Robotaxi app and is operating a ride-hailing fleet using modified Model Ys running on its vision-based Full Self-Driving (FSD) software. They are currently running full “unsupervised” (no safety driver) commercial rides in Austin, Texas, and supervised rides in the San Francisco Bay Area, with near-term expansion plans for cities like Las Vegas, Miami, and Dallas.

“Disintermediation” is simply a financial term for cutting out the middleman. For the last decade, Uber’s ultimate competitive moat has been its massive, two-sided network: it aggregates millions of riders and millions of human drivers in one place.

Wall Street bears argue that autonomous vehicles represent an existential threat to that moat. If vertically integrated companies like Tesla or Alphabet (Waymo) can manufacture their own cars, write their own autonomous software, and connect directly with consumers through their own apps, they do not need Uber. If Tesla can operate a Cybercab at a fraction of the cost per mile of a human-driven Uber, and they pass those savings directly to the rider via the Tesla app, consumers will simply delete Uber. The bear thesis is that Uber will be relegated to a dying network of expensive human drivers while the tech giants monopolize the cheap, automated future.

The Autonomous Agent Threat

Today, OpenClaw operates as a rapidly growing, open-source autonomous AI assistant that lives inside messaging apps like WhatsApp or Telegram, actively executing complex digital tasks—like managing your inbox, booking flights, or running background web searches—rather than just answering text prompts.

The bearish thesis for ride-hailing networks is that as these local AI agents become seamlessly integrated into everyone’s smartphones, they will become the ultimate universal aggregators. Instead of a consumer opening the Uber app, their personal agent will autonomously scan the real-time pricing of Uber, Waymo, Tesla, Lyft, and Empower, instantly booking the cheapest or fastest option. Consumers shift their loyalty to the AI agent layer rather than the ride-hailing app, Uber risks being downgraded from a dominant consumer platform to a mere commoditized supplier of vehicles, threatening to dissolve its network moat entirely.

Bulls argue that tech giants like Uber and Waymo are fully aware of this threat. They can, and will, aggressively lock down their APIs, update their terms of service, and employ advanced anti-bot measures to prevent open-source agents from scraping their live pricing data.

I disagree. I own a piece of Insider Monkey. The threat of AI agents to Uber operates on the same brutal game theory that currently forces financial media platforms, such as Insider Monkey, to remain open to AI scrapers. If a dominant player attempts to protect its margins or network by erecting a walled garden—whether that is a content paywall or an API block—they instantly create a lucrative vacuum for challengers. In the mobility sector, if Uber locks out autonomous agents like OpenClaw, a hungry competitor like Lyft, Waymo, or a regional startup will gladly grant those agents frictionless access to capture the diverted volume. This fear of being entirely excluded from the new agent-driven ecosystem creates a relentless race to the bottom, forcing platforms to surrender their exclusive gatekeeper status and accept rapid commoditization rather than risk complete irrelevance.

That’s why I believe Uber Technologies (UBER) will lose at least 70% of its value over the next few years. I am not talking about a 5 to 10 year time frame. This will probably happen within 1-3 years. Uber’s profit margin will evaporate, and its stock price will crash.

UBER won’t be the only victim of AI agents.

The rise of autonomous AI agents fundamentally threatens any business model built on consumer friction and inertia, extending far beyond ride-hailing right into the core of traditional banking.

Right now, legacy institutions like JPMorgan Chase (JPM) get away with paying a practically non-existent 0.01% yield on basic checking accounts simply because the average consumer is too busy to hunt down a 3.5% rate and manually wire funds back and forth. That massive spread is pure profit extracted directly from your lack of time. But once a localized AI agent is authorized to optimize your financial life, that friction drops to zero.

The exact same background assistant that instantly secures the cheapest robotaxi will routinely sweep your idle cash to whichever institution offers the highest overnight yield, completely vaporizing the “lazy consumer” premium banks have relied on for decades.

We are entering a brutal new era where the ultimate economic moat is no longer consumer habit, but the AI infrastructure itself. For anyone allocating capital with a hedge fund mentality, the most logical trade of the decade is to short the legacy gatekeepers—like Uber and JPMorgan Chase (JPM)—who are about to be ruthlessly disintermediated, and recycle those proceeds directly into the top AI infrastructure stocks powering the agentic revolution (see my #1 AI stock pick here).

Disclosure: Inan Dogan, PhD is the co-founder and Research Director of Insider Monkey, a prominent financial data and media platform. Dr. Dogan holds a Ph.D. in financial economics. As the Research Director, he leads the platform’s premium investment newsletter and portfolio strategies. His work primarily focuses on uncovering high-conviction investment ideas by closely tracking and analyzing the public filings of elite hedge fund managers and corporate insiders. Dr Dogan has a long position in GOOGL. The views expressed in this article are strictly those of Dr. Dogan and should not be construed as formal investment advice. You can follow Inan Dogan on X.