By JEFF MARTIN and JACK BROOK, Associated Press

ATLANTA (AP) — The only escaped Louisiana inmate who remained on the run following an audacious May jailbreak in which 10 men crawled through a hole behind a toilet has been found in Atlanta, the U.S. Marshals said Wednesday.

Derrick Groves was taken into custody in a house after evading authorities for nearly five months, Deputy U.S. Marshal Brian Fair confirmed. Sgt. Kate Stegall, a spokesperson for the Louisiana State Police, also said Groves was in custody after a brief standoff.

Groves, 28, had been convicted of murder and was facing a possible life sentence before the jailbreak. He had the most violent criminal record of the escapees and authorities had offered a $50,000 reward for tips that lead to his recapture.

“He was hiding in a crawl space,” Fair said. “It appears he was the only one in this house and he was hidden pretty well.”

No one else was arrested, Fair said. Groves was arrested by the U.S. Marshals southeast regional fugitive task force and Atlanta Police Department SWAT team, Fair said.

The other nine escapees had been recaptured within six weeks of breaking out of the New Orleans jail on May 16, and most were found still in Louisiana.

This photo provided by John Hall Thomas shows Derrick Groves in New Orleans on Oct. 24, 2019 during a court appearance related to a 2018 shooting that killed two people and injured others. (John Hall Thomas via AP)

Last escapee’s mother reacts to his capture

“I’m all messed up, I’m just trying to talk to him,” Groves’ mother, Stephanie Groves, told The Associated Press. “I’m just seeing it on the internet, I woke up to it on the internet.”

Holding back tears, she said she was concerned for her son’s safety and has wanted him to surrender peacefully. She said she does not know why he went to Atlanta and has not been in contact with him after he escaped. Her family has been followed and surveilled by law enforcement, she said.

“It’s just been a mess,” she said. “I’m just glad it’s over with.”

“Of course he was going to get caught,” she added.

FILE – This undated handout photo shows Derrick D. Groves, one of the inmates who escaped from a New Orleans jail on May 16, 2025. (Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office via AP, File)

The escape in New Orleans

Groves and the nine other men yanked open a faulty cell door inside the New Orleans jail, squeezed through a hole behind a toilet, scaled a barbed-wire fence and fled into the coverage of darkness. With 10 men on the lam, it was one of the largest jailbreaks in recent U.S. history.

The inmates’ absence wasn’t discovered until a morning headcount, hours after they bolted for freedom. At the scene of the crime, the cell where the men removed a toilet to sneak through a hole, they left a message. On the cell wall they drew an arrow, pointing at the gap they slipped through — above it was a graffitied message: “To Easy LoL.”

City and state officials have pointed to multiple security lapses in the jail, including ineffective cell locks and the assertion that the inmates got out when the lone guard monitoring them went to get food. But authorities remain adamant that the men also had likely had help and that the escape may have been an inside job.

A maintenance worker at the jail was arrested for allegedly helping the incarcerated men escape, by turning off the water to the toilet where a hole was cut behind for the fugitives to sneak out of. The man has denied knowingly aiding them via his lawyer, who says he was just unclogging a toilet. Another former jail employee, identified by authorities as Groves’ girlfriend, is accused of helping coordinate the escape.

Search for the fugitives

Hundreds of law enforcement officers scoured the city for the fugitives and leveraged phone records and hundreds of tips to track some of them down quickly.

At least 16 people, many of them friends and family of the escapees, have been accused of aiding the fugitives before or after the jailbreak and were arrested on felony charges. Court documents allege that those people provided food, cash, transport and shelter.

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One fugitive allegedly hid out in a vacant home which his friend had been hired to repaint and was captured in Baton Rouge, more than 80 miles (129 kilometers) from New Orleans. Two others were caught after a high-speed car chase in Walker County, Texas. But most of the fugitives were found inside Orleans Parish city limits.

Antoine Massey, one of the last fugitives to be recaptured, allegedly posted photos and videos on social media while on the run.

Many of the men on the lam were originally in the New Orleans jail, awaiting sentences or trials, for alleged violent crimes including murder. Groves, the last escapee to be recaptured, had been convicted of second-degree murder in 2024 for opening fire on a family block party, killing two people and injuring others. He faces life imprisonment without parole.

Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson, who has largely blamed the breakout on ailing infrastructure at the jail, has faced widespread criticism from state and local officials over her handling of the escape and management of the jail.

Escapees face additional charges

The nine other men accused of breaking out of the city jail pleaded not guilty to escape charges in July, appearing via video call from the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

“Everyone is entitled to due process. But there’s a video of these detainees running out of the jail in the middle of the night. They were not heading to court hearings,” state Attorney General Liz Murrill said. “We will continue to hold everyone accountable for the escape.”

All 10 men are charged with simple escape, which is tacked on top of previous criminal counts that initially landed them in jail, according to Murrill’s office. The escape charge carries a sentence of two to five years in prison.

Groves’ attorney was present for the arraignment but did not enter a plea on his behalf, reported The New Orleans Advocate/The Times-Picayune.

Brook reported from New Orleans.

By KELVIN CHAN and MATT O’BRIEN, AP Technology Writers

LONDON (AP) — Lingering doubts about the economic promise of artificial intelligence technology are starting to get the attention of financial institutions that raised warning flags this week about an AI investment bubble.

Officials at the Bank of England on Wednesday flagged the growing risk that tech stock prices pumped up by the AI boom could burst.

“The risk of a sharp market correction has increased,” the U.K. central bank said.

The head of the International Monetary Fund raised a similar alarm hours after the Bank of England’s report.

Global stock prices have been surging, fired up by “optimism about the productivity-enhancing potential of AI,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said.

But financial conditions could “turn abruptly,” she warned in a speech ahead of the organization’s annual meeting next week in Washington.

Is there an AI bubble?

“Bubbles obviously are never very easy to identify, but we can see there are a few potential symptoms of a bubble in the current situation,” said Adam Slater, lead economist at Oxford Economics.

Those symptoms include rapid growth in tech stock prices, the fact that tech stocks now comprise about 40% of the S&P 500, market valuations that appear “stretched” beyond their worth and “a general sense of extreme optimism in terms of the underlying technology, despite the enormous uncertainties around what this technology might ultimately yield,” Slater said.

The most optimistic projections about the fruits of generative AI products foresee a transformation of the economy, leading to annual productivity gains that Slater says have not been seen since the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. At the lower end, economist Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has predicted a “nontrivial but modest” U.S. productivity gain of just 0.7% over a decade.

“You’ve got this incredibly wide range of possibilities,” Slater said. “Nobody really knows where it’s going to land.”

Doubts about the worth of top AI companies

Investors have closely watched a series of intertwined deals over recent months between top AI developers such as OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, and the companies building the costly computer chips and data centers needed to power these AI products.

OpenAI doesn’t turn a profit but the privately held San Francisco firm is now the world’s most valuable startup, with a market valuation of $500 billion. It recently signed major deals with chipmaker Nvidia, the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, and its rival AMD.

The Bank of England didn’t name any specific companies but said that on “a number of measures, equity market valuations appear stretched, particularly for technology companies focused on Artificial Intelligence.”

The report said stock market valuations are “comparable to the peak” of the 2000 dotcom bubble, which then deflated and led to a recession. With tech stocks accounting for an increasingly large share of benchmark stock indexes, stock markets are “particularly exposed should expectations around the impact of AI become less optimistic.”

The bank outlined so-called downside risks, including shortages of electricity, data or chips that could slow AI progress, or technological changes that could lessen the need for the type of AI infrastructure currently being built around the world.

The IMF’s Georgieva said current stock valuations “are heading toward levels we saw during the bullishness about the internet 25 years ago. If a sharp correction were to occur, tighter financial conditions could drag down world growth,” she said.

What the tech bosses say

Tech company bosses are downplaying the doomsayers.

The current AI boom is an industrial, rather than financial or banking, bubble and will be beneficial for society even if it bursts, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said.

“The ones that are industrial are not nearly as bad. It could even be good because when the dust settles and you see who are the winners, society benefits from those inventions,” Bezos said at a recent tech conference in Italy.

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He compared it to a previous biotech bubble in the 1990s that resulted in new life-saving drugs.

The excitement around AI is drawing in a huge wave of money to fund new business ideas, but it’s also clouding investors’ judgment, Bezos said.

“Every company gets funded, the good ideas and the bad ideas. And investors have a hard time in the middle of this excitement distinguishing between the good and bad ideas and so that’s also probably happening today,” he said.

On a tour last month of a Texas data center, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted people will “make some dumb capital allocations” and there will be short-term ups and downs of overinvestment and underinvestment.

But he added that “over the arc that we have to plan over, we are confident that this technology will drive a new wave of unprecedented economic growth,” along with scientific breakthroughs, improvements to quality of life and “new ways to express creativity.”

Awaiting the promise of more useful AI agents

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang acknowledged in a CNBC interview on Wednesday that OpenAI doesn’t yet have the money to buy its chips, but “they’re going to have to raise that money” through revenue, which “is growing exponentially,” along with equity or debt.

Huang said he also believes a transition has happened as leading AI developers are moving from chatbots that operated “basically at a loss” because the models “weren’t useful enough” to one in which the AI systems are capable of higher-level reasoning.

“It’s doing research before it answers a question,” he said. “It goes on the web and studies other PDFs and websites, it can now use tools, generate information for you, and it creates responses that are really useful.”

AI companies have spent more than a year pitching the transformative potential of “AI agents” that can go beyond a chatbot’s capability by being able to access a person’s computer and do coding and other work tasks on their behalf. But as the initial hype fades, Forrester analyst Sudha Maheshwari said businesses looking to buy these AI tools are taking a closer look at whether they’re getting enough return on their investments.

“Every bubble inevitably bursts, and in 2026, AI will lose its sheen, trading its tiara for a hard hat,” she wrote in a report Wednesday.

O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island and Abilene, Texas.

By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER, AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — Most members of the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate setting committee supported further reductions to its key interest rate this year, according to minutes from last month’s meeting released Wednesday.

A majority of Fed officials felt that the risk unemployment would rise had worsened since their previous meeting in July, while the risk of rising inflation “had either diminished or not increased,” the minutes said. As a result, the central bank decided at its Sept. 16-17 meeting to reduce its key rate by a quarter-point to about 4.1%, its first cut this year.

Rate cuts by the Fed can gradually lower borrowing costs for things like mortgages, auto loans, and business loans, encouraging more spending and hiring.

Still, the minutes underscored the deep division on the 19-person committee between those who feel that the Fed’s short-term rate is too high and weighing on the economy, and those who point to persistent inflation that remains above the central bank’s 2% target as evidence that the Fed needs to be cautious about reducing rates.

How members of the Federal Open Market Committee voted Wednesday on cutting a key interest rate. (AP Digital Embed)

Only one official formally dissented from the quarter-point cut: Stephen Miran, who was appointed by President Donald Trump and was approved by the Senate just hours before the meeting began. He supported a larger, half-point cut instead.

But the minutes noted that “a few” policymakers said they could have supported keeping rates unchanged, or said that “there was merit” in such a step.

The differences help explain Chair Jerome Powell’s statements during the news conference that followed the meeting: “There are no risk-free paths now. It’s not incredibly obvious what to do.”

Miran said in remarks Tuesday that he thinks inflation will steadily decline back toward the Fed’s 2% target, despite Trump’s tariffs, and as a result he doesn’t think the Fed’s rate needs to be nearly as high as it is. Rental costs are steadily declining and will bring down inflation, he said, while tariff revenue will reduce the government’s budget deficit and reduce longer-term interest rates, which gives the Fed more room to cut.

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Yet many other Fed officials remain concerned about stubbornly high inflation, the minutes showed. Jeffrey Schmid, president of the Federal Reserve’s Kansas City branch, said in a speech Monday that “inflation is too high” and argued that the Fed should keep rates high enough to cool demand and prevent inflation from worsening.

And Austan Goolsbee, president of the Fed’s Chicago branch, said in an interview Friday with The Associated Press that he supported a cautious approach toward more cuts, and wanted to see evidence that inflation would cool further.

“I am a little uneasy with front loading rate cuts, presuming that those upticks in inflation will just go away,” he said.

The minutes provide insight into how the Fed’s policymakers were thinking last month about inflation, interest rates, and hiring. Since then, however, the federal government shutdown has cut off the flow of economic data that the Fed relies on to inform its decisions. The September jobs report wasn’t issued as scheduled last Friday, and if the shutdown continues, it could also delay the release of the inflation report set for next Wednesday.

By FATIMA HUSSEIN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The IRS will furlough nearly half of its workforce as part of the ongoing government shutdown, according to the an updated contingency plan posted Wednesday to the agency website. Most IRS operations are closed, the agency said in a separate letter to IRS workers.

The news comes after President Donald Trump and Congress failed to strike an agreement to fund federal operations and the government shutdown has entered its second week, with no discernible endgame in sight.

The agency’s initial Lapse in Appropriations Contingency Plan provided for the first five business days of operations, when states that the department would remain open using Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act funds.

Now, only 39,870 employees, or 53.6%, will remain working as the shutdown continues.

Last week Trump said roughly 750,000 federal workers nationwide were expected to be furloughed across agencies, with some potentially fired by his administration.

The layoffs come as earlier this year the IRS embarked on mass layoffs, spearheaded by the Department of Government Efficiency, affecting tens of thousands of workers. At the end of 2024, the agency employed roughly 100,000 workers — and currently hovers around 75,000.

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