By MICHAEL HILL, Associated Press

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — A judge has dismissed a Trump administration legal challenge to New York policies that block immigration officials from arresting people at state courthouses, saying the federal government can’t force states to cooperate with those enforcement efforts.

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U.S. District Judge Mae D’Agostino late Monday granted New York’s motion to dismiss the government’s lawsuit, one of several legal actions from the Republican administration targeting state and local policies over immigration enforcement.

The lawsuit challenged a 2020 state law banning federal immigration officials from arresting people who are coming and going from New York courthouses or in court for proceedings unless they have a warrant signed by a judge. The law, called the Protect Our Courts Act, was approved in response to enforcement actions at courthouses during President Donald Trump’s first term.

In its lawsuit, the Department of Justice claimed that the New York law and two related state executive orders were unconstitutional because they obstructed the execution of federal immigration authorities.

D’Agostino, though, found that New York’s decision not to participate in enforcing civil immigration law is protected by the 10th Amendment, which sets boundaries on the federal government’s powers.

“Fundamentally, the United States fails to identify any federal law mandating that state and local officials generally assist or cooperate with federal immigration enforcement efforts. Nor could it,” the judge wrote. “No such federal laws exist because the Tenth Amendment prohibits Congress from conscripting state and local officials and resources to assist with federal regulatory schemes, like immigration enforcement.”

The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to a Tuesday email seeking comment about the ruling, including whether it plans to appeal.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat whose office argued for the lawsuit to be dismissed, said she was fighting for the “dignity and rights of immigrant communities.”

“Everyone deserves to seek justice without fear,” James said in a statement. “This ruling ensures that anyone can use New York’s state courts without being targeted by federal authorities.”

NEW YORK (AP) — The leader of an Eastern European neo-Nazi group who tried to recruit an undercover federal agent to dress as Santa Claus and hand out poisoned candy to Jewish children and racial minorities has pleaded guilty to soliciting hate crimes.

Federal prosecutors said they would seek a sentence of up to 18 years for Michail Chkhikvishvili, a 22-year-old from the Republic of Georgia who also goes by “Commander Butcher.” He pleaded guilty Monday before a federal judge in Brooklyn to soliciting violent felonies and distributing information about making bombs and ricin.

Prosecutors described Chkhikvishvili as the leader of the Maniac Murder Cult, an international extremist group that adheres to a “neo-Nazi accelerationist ideology and promotes violence and violent acts against racial minorities, the Jewish community and other groups it deems ‘undesirables.’”

They said the group’s violent solicitations — promoted through Telegram channels and outlined a manifesto called the “Hater’s Handbook” — appear to have inspired multiple real-life killings, including a school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, earlier this year that left a 16-year-old student dead.

He was arrested in July 2024 in Moldova. He was extradited to the United States in May.

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Since 2022, Chkhikvishvili has traveled on multiple occasions to Brooklyn, where he bragged about beating up an elderly Jewish man and instructed others, primarily through text messages, to commit violent acts on behalf of the Maniac Murder Cult, according to court papers.

When he was approached by an undercover FBI agent in 2023, Chkhikvishvili recruited the official to a scheme that “involved an individual dressing up as Santa Claus and handing out candy laced with poison to racial minorities and children at Jewish schools in Brooklyn,” according to the Justice Department.

He later suggested narrowing the focus to “dead Jewish kids,” prosecutors said, after noting that “Jews are literally everywhere” in Brooklyn.

Describing his desire to carry out a mass casualty attack, Chkhikvishvili said he saw the United States as “big potential because accessibility to firearms,” adding that the undercover should consider targeting homeless people because the government wouldn’t care “even if they die,” according to court papers.

By ANTON L. DELGADO, Associated Press

BELEM, Brazil (AP) — At the U.N. climate talks in Brazil, artificial intelligence is being cast as both a hero worthy of praise and a villain that needs policing.

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Tech companies and a handful of countries at the conference known as COP30 are promoting ways AI can help solve global warming, which is driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal. They say the technology has the potential to do many things, from increasing the efficiency of electrical grids and helping farmers predict weather patterns to tracking deep-sea migratory species and designing infrastructure that can withstand extreme weather.

Climate groups, however, are sounding the alarm about AI’s growing environmental impact, with its surging needs for electricity and water for powering searches and data centers. They say an AI boom without guardrails will only push the world farther off track from goals set by 2015 Paris Agreement to slow global warming.

“AI right now is a completely unregulated beast around the world,” said Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

On the other hand, Adam Elman, director of sustainability at Google, sees AI as “a real enabler” and one that’s already making an impact.

If both sides agree on anything, it’s that AI is here to stay.

Michal Nachmany, founder of Climate Policy Radar, which runs AI tools that track issues like national climate plans and funds to help developing countries transition to green energies like solar and wind, said there is “unbelievable interest” in AI at COP30.

“Everyone is also a little bit scared,” Nachmany said. “The potential is huge and the risks are huge as well.”

Attendees walk past boxes made to look like the Eiffel Tower with a sign that reads “1.5 degrees Celsius under threat” talking about the Paris Agreement during the COP30 U.N. Climate Summit, Monday, Nov. 17, 2025, in Belem, Brazil. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

Many sessions on AI

The rise of AI is becoming a more common topic at the United Nations compared to a few years ago, according to Nitin Arora, who leads the Global Innovation Hub for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the framework for international climate negotiations.

The hub was launched at COP26 in Glasgow to promote ideas and solutions that can be deployed at scale, he said. So far, Arora said, those ideas have been dominated by AI.

The Associated Press counted at least 24 sessions related to AI during the Brazil conference’s first week. They included AI helping neighboring cities share energy, AI-backed forest crime location predictions and a ceremony for the first AI for Climate Action Award — given to an AI project on water scarcity and climate variability in the Southeast Asian nation of Laos.

Johannes Jacob, a data scientist with the German delegation, said a prototype app he is designing, called NegotiateCOP, can help countries with smaller delegations — like El Salvador, South Africa, Ivory Coast and a few in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations — process hundreds of official COP documents.

The result is “leveling the playing field in the negotiations,” he said.

In a panel discussion, representatives from AI giants like Google and Nvidia spoke about how AI can solve issues facing the power sector. Elman with Google stressed the “need to do it responsibly” but declined to comment further.

Nvidia’s head of sustainability, Josh Parker, called AI the “best resource any of us can have.”

“AI is so democratizing,” Parker said. “If you think about climate tech, climate change and all the sustainability challenges we’re trying to solve here at COP, which one of those challenges would not be solved better and faster, with more intelligence.”

Princess Abze Djigma from Burkina Faso called AI a “breakthrough in digitalization” that she believes will be even more critical in the future.

Bjorn-Soren Gigler, a senior digital and green transformation specialist with the European Commission, agreed but noted AI is “often seen as a double-edge sword” with both huge opportunities and ethical and environmental concerns.

Booming AI use raises concerns

The training and deploying of AI models rely on power-hungry data centers that contribute to emissions because of the electricity needed. The International Energy Agency has tracked a boom in energy consumption and demand from data centers, especially in the U.S.

Data centers accounted for around 1.5% of the world’s electricity consumption in 2024, according to the IEA, which found that their electricity consumption has grown by around 12% per year since 2017, more than four times faster than the rate of total electricity consumption.

The environmental impact from AI, specifically the operations of data centers, also includes the consumption of large amounts of water in water-stressed states, according to Su with the Center for Biological Diversity, who has studied how the data center boom threatens U.S. climate goals.

She said these operations will increase the national emissions of the U.S., historically the world’s largest polluter.

Environmental groups at COP30 are pushing for regulations to soften AI’s environmental footprint, such as mandating public interest tests for proposed data centers and 100% on-site renewable energy at them.

“COP can not only view AI as some type of techno solution, it has to understand the deep climate consequences,” Su said.

Associated Press writer Seth Borenstein in Belem, Brazil, contributed to this report.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org

This story was produced as part of the 2025 Climate Change Media Partnership, a journalism fellowship organized by Internews’ Earth Journalism Network and the Stanley Center for Peace and Security.

By MATT O’BRIEN, AP Technology Writer

For technology adopters looking for the next big thing, “agentic AI” is the future. At least, that’s what the marketing pitches and tech industry T-shirts say.

What makes an artificial intelligence product “agentic” depends on who’s selling it. But the promise is usually that it’s a step beyond today’s generative AI chatbots.

Chatbots, however useful, are all talk and no action. They can answer questions, retrieve and summarize information, write papers and generate images, music, video and lines of code. AI agents, by contrast, are supposed to be able to take actions autonomously on a person’s behalf.

But if you’re confused, you’re not alone. Google searches for “agentic” have skyrocketed from near obscurity a year ago to a peak earlier this fall.

A new report Tuesday by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Boston Consulting Group, who surveyed more than 2,000 business executives around the world, describes agentic AI as a “new class of systems” that “can plan, act, and learn on their own.”

“They are not just tools to be operated or assistants waiting for instructions,” says the MIT Sloan Management Review report. “Increasingly, they behave like autonomous teammates, capable of executing multistep processes and adapting as they go.”

How to know if it’s an AI agent or just a fancy chatbot

AI chatbots — such as the original ChatGPT that debuted three years ago this month — rely on systems called large language models that predict the next word in a sentence based on the huge trove of human writings they’ve been trained on. They can sound remarkably human, especially when given a voice, but are effectively performing a kind of word completion.

That’s different from what AI developers — including ChatGPT’s maker, OpenAI, and tech giants like Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Salesforce — have in mind for AI agents.

“A generative AI-based chatbot will say, ‘Here are the great ideas’ … and then be done,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Agentic AI at Amazon Web Services, in an interview this week. “It’s useful, but what makes things agentic is that it goes beyond what a chatbot does.”

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Sivasubramanian, a longtime Amazon employee, took on his new role helping to lead work on AI agents in Amazon’s cloud computing division earlier this year. He sees great promise in AI systems that can be given a “high-level goal” and break it down into a series of steps and act upon them. “I truly believe agentic AI is going to be one of the biggest transformations since the beginning of the cloud,” he said.

At its most basic level, an AI agent works like a traditional, human-crafted computer program that executes a job, like launching an application. Combined with an AI large language model, however, it can search for knowledge that enables it to complete tasks without explicit, step-by-step instructions. That means, instead of just helping you draft the language of an email, it can theoretically handle the whole process — receiving a message from your coworker, figuring out what you might want to say, and firing off the response on its own.

For most consumers, the first encounters with AI agents could be in realms like online shopping. Set a budget and some preferences and AI agents can buy things or arrange travel bookings using your credit card. In the longer run, the hope is that they can do more complex tasks with access to your computer and a set of guidelines to follow.

“I’d love an agent that just looked at all my medical bills and explanations of benefits and figured out how to pay them,” or another one that worked like a “personal shield” fighting off email spam and phishing attempts, said Thomas Dietterich, a professor emeritus at Oregon State University who has worked on developing AI assistants for decades.

Dietterich has some quibbles with companies using “agentic” to describe “any action a computer might do, including just looking things up on the web,” but is enthused about the possibilities of AI systems given the “freedom and responsibility” to refine goals and respond to changing conditions as they work on people’s behalf. They can even orchestrate a team of “subagents.”

“We can imagine a world in which there are thousands or millions of agents operating and they can form coalitions,” Dietterich said. “Can they form cartels? Would there be law enforcement (AI) agents?”

‘Agentic’ is a trendy buzzword based on an older idea

Milind Tambe has been researching AI agents that work together for three decades, since the first International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems gathered in San Francisco in 1995. Tambe said he’s been “amused” by the sudden popularity of “agentic” as an adjective. Previously, the word describing something that has agency was mostly found in other academic fields, such as psychology or chemistry.

But computer scientists have been debating what an agent is for as long as Tambe has been studying them.

In the 1990s, “people agreed that some software appeared more like an agent, and some felt less like an agent, and there was not a perfect dividing line,” said Tambe, a professor at Harvard University. “Nonetheless, it seemed useful to use the word ‘agent’ to describe software or robotic entities acting autonomously in an environment, sensing the environment, reacting to it, planning, thinking.”

The prominent AI researcher Andrew Ng, co-founder of online learning company Coursera, helped advocate for popularizing the adjective “agentic” more than a year ago to encompass a broader spectrum of AI tasks. At the time, he also appreciated that mainly “technical people” were describing it that way.

“When I see an article that talks about ‘agentic’ workflows, I’m more likely to read it, since it’s less likely to be marketing fluff and more likely to have been written by someone who understands the technology,” Ng wrote in a June 2024 blog post.

Ng didn’t respond to requests for comment on whether he still thinks that.