Waymo claims prompting a generative model with sensor data and moving the car on its answer

2026-09-24Filings

United States Patent Application Publication No. 2026/0285357 A1, Waymo LLC, "Prevention of Traffic Obstructions Using Artificial Intelligence Systems in Automotive Vehicle Applications," Application No. 19/082,835, filed March 18, 2025, published September 24, 2026

Claim 1 recites an autonomous vehicle with a sensing system, a data processing system that generates a prompt for a generative artificial intelligence model, the prompt comprising spatial data characterizing the driving environment, being either the sensing data itself or the spatial arrangement of objects identified from it, together with a request to determine whether the vehicle is obstructing traffic, causes the model to process the prompt and generate a response indicating that the vehicle is obstructing traffic, and a control system that repositions the vehicle in response. Claim 14 places the model on a computing device outside the vehicle, and claim 15 is the method. The dependent claims add that the vehicle is stationary when the assessment is made, that the request is natural language text, that the model is a vision language model or a multimodal language model, that heuristic metrics screen a location before the model is asked, and that the model was trained on datasets carrying ground truth blocking determinations. The specification describes the model generically as a language model, a large language model, a vision language model or a multimodal language model, and no claim is limited to a particular architecture or training method.

What it changesThis is the claim form for a language model used as a judgment component inside a physical system: build the prompt from sensor data, ask a yes-or-no question, act on the answer with a physical operation. The repositioning step is what separates it from the claims the Federal Circuit held abstract in Recentive Analytics, Inc. v. Fox Corp. and the decisions that followed it, where a generic model was applied to a new category of data and the output was more data, so a company putting a language model in the loop of a robot, a vehicle, a production line or a medical device should claim the action the answer triggers and not only the answer. Because it was published, the application is prior art under Section 102(a)(2) of Title 35 of the United States Code as of March 18, 2025 against anyone who filed later on using a vision language model to evaluate a stopping location, and it belongs in the file of any company running a similar model-in-the-loop design. It also shows an Alphabet company treating a general purpose language model as a component of the driving stack rather than a research tool, and filing on the integration rather than on the model.

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