Philadelphia is leading the fight against clankers, attack Uber Eats delivery robots one month after launch

One month after Uber Eats launched Avride autonomous delivery robots in Philadelphia, city residents are already kicking them over. A robot in Center City was kicked multiple times in late March. The second time it got kicked it toppled over completely.

We wrote about this exact scenario when Waymo announced it was bringing driverless cars to the city. Nobody wanted to hear it. Here we are.

The War Against Clankers Has Begun…

❌ no clankers

— The Liberty Line (@LibertyLinePHL) April 11, 2026

War Against Robots: No Clankers!

A group of late-night revelers inside a roving karaoke trolley was the last thing a delivery robot experienced before being toppled over by a forceful kick from a Philadelphian over the weekend.

The bot had only been in Philadelphia for 18 days.https://t.co/YIeVoZ38AS pic.twitter.com/68nWCk89LX

— The Philadelphia Inquirer (@PhillyInquirer) April 1, 2026

Let me say again what I said then because it is more relevant now than it was when I first wrote it.

Tim Dillon brought this up on a recent podcast and the observation is impossible to argue with. Homeless people are already living with the robots. They are the only ones on the streets at 3 AM when your delivery robot is rolling down the sidewalk.

They are the ones watching the Waymo cars cruise through Center City at night completely driverless. There is nobody else out there. The homeless population is the first line of defense between functioning society and the robots of the future and right now, they are completely alone in that position.

Waymo is almost live in Philadelphia and nobody is talking about what happens next

We are already seeing what happens when those two worlds collide. In San Francisco in July 2024 a man yelled at a Waymo, escalated, and later attacked the person filming him and fractured their skull. In February 2024 a couple inside a Waymo felt trapped when someone blocked the car and tried to cover its sensors.

In December 2025 a man was found inside the trunk of a Waymo in Los Angeles. In Phoenix and San Francisco there have been ongoing incidents of people harassing the cars. Waymo’s advice to passengers is to stay inside the vehicle.

That is one company in a handful of cities. Uber Eats just launched delivery robots in Philadelphia. Waymo is coming next. Now scale it up.

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What happens when Peter Thiel deploys his robots and police forces in American cities? Thiel co-founded Palantir Technologies, which runs the Gotham platform used by law enforcement to integrate license plate readers, bank records, personal data, and real-time tracking into a single surveillance system.

Philly tried to warn everyone with Hitchbot. No one listened.

HitchBot was a hitchhiking robot that relied on the kindness of strangers to travel the world.

It successfully hitchhiked across Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands, but while attempting to hitchhike across the United States, it was found with its head and arms ripped off in… pic.twitter.com/ghi4bNm8Tk

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) March 8, 2026

That infrastructure already exists and is already operational. The autonomous enforcement layer is the next step and when it arrives, who gets targeted first? The people with addresses and lawyers, or the population that is already invisible to the system?

The homeless are going to get absolutely terrorized by autonomous security forces. That is not speculation. That is the logical conclusion of the trajectory we are already on. And it is not going to stay contained to the people society has already forgotten. It never does and that’s why the anti-clanker movement is so important.

You either join, or you become a part of it anyways, whether you realize it or not. Pokemon Go sold thirty billion images that are now being used for mapping and delivery infrastructure.

Shocker: Pokemon Go players handed tech companies a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images to train artificial intelligence

The next app you download for fun could be contributing to mapping a drone route or a robot patrol pattern through your neighborhood. You are already in the trenches. You just have not noticed yet because the early casualties are people you walk past without making eye contact.

The robots are here in Philadelphia now. The Waymo cars are coming. Business owners see opportunity. The rest of us should be paying closer attention to what we are actually welcoming into our city.

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