By PHILIP MARCELO

NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge has blocked President Donald Trump’s administration’s efforts to halt New York’s first-in-the-nation congestion fee meant to reduce traffic and pump revenue into the region’s aging transit system.

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U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman on Tuesday ruled that the U.S. Department of Transportation lacked the authority to unilaterally rescind approval of the $9 toll, which former Democratic President Joe Biden initially green-lit.

Instead, he sided with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which had argued that the department’s reversal was “unlawful” because the agency had not adequately explained its reasoning.

“The Secretary’s actions were arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion, and not in accordance with law,” Liman wrote in his 149-page ruling, referring to Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.

The judge noted that New York’s legislature passed the toll, which its governor signed into law and received the necessary federal approvals before launching.

“The democratic process worked,” Liman wrote, even as he left the door open for future attempts by Trump and other opponents to kill the program, which took effect on Jan. 5, 2025.

Gov. Kathy Hochul said the decision vindicates a “once-in-a-lifetime success story” that’s “yielded huge benefits” in its first year of operation, including reducing gridlock and unlocking critical funding for mass transit.

“The judge’s decision is clear: Donald Trump’s unlawful attempts to trample on the self-governance of his home state have failed spectacularly,” the Democrat said in a statement. “Congestion pricing is legal, it works, and it is here to stay.”

The U.S. DOT said it’s reviewing its legal options, including appealing.

“Once again, working-class Americans are being sidelined under Governor Kathy Hochul’s policies, which impose a massive tax on every New Yorker,” the agency said in a statement.

New York’s congestion toll is imposed on most vehicles driving into Manhattan south of Central Park.

The toll varies depending on vehicle type and time of day, and is added to tolls drivers already pay to cross bridges and tunnels into Manhattan, but generally costs about $9.

Congestion pricing schemes aimed at reducing traffic pollution and encouraging public transit use have long existed in other global cities, including London, Stockholm, Milan and Singapore, but not in the U.S.

But Trump, whose namesake Trump Tower and other properties are within the congestion zone, has strongly opposed the idea. During his presidential campaign, he vowed to kill New York’s plan as soon as he took office.

Then last February, Duffy rescinded the toll’s federal approval, calling the fee “a slap in the face to working-class Americans and small business owners.” He threatened to withhold federal funding for projects in New York if the toll weren’t discontinued.

But Liman temporarily blocked the administration from following through on those threats until he issued a final decision. The Manhattan judge previously dismissed a series of lawsuits brought by local opponents, including New Jersey’s governor, unionized teachers in New York City, a trucking industry group and local suburban leaders.

Hochul had been a vocal supporter of the toll but paused its planned rollout in 2024, a move widely seen as an attempt to help suburban Democrats in congressional races where the toll was divisive. She then reinstated the fee after the election, but lowered it from $15 to $9.

As the program marked its first anniversary in January, Hochul, who is up for reelection, joined the MTA in touting the toll’s benefits.

According to a recent MTA report, the toll has led to some 27 million fewer vehicles coming into the heart of Manhattan, resulting in 22% less air pollution and 23% faster commute times for those opting to drive and pay the fee.

The toll has also generated more than $550 million in revenue for the region’s creaky and cash-strapped transit system — exceeding projections, the MTA has said.

Sales tax revenues, office leases and foot traffic in the congestion zone have all increased since the toll took effect, disproving concerns it would hurt the local economy, according to the agency.

“Traffic is down, business is up, and we’re making crucial investments in a transit system that moves millions of people a day,” Janno Lieber, the MTA’s CEO, said Tuesday. “New York is winning.”

Follow Philip Marcelo at https://x.com/philmarcelo

By MATT O’BRIEN, AP Technology Writer

Anthropic’s moral stand on U.S. military use of artificial intelligence is reshaping the competition between leading AI companies but also exposing a growing awareness that maybe chatbots just aren’t capable enough for acts of war.

Anthropic’s chatbot Claude, for the first time, outpaced rival ChatGPT in phone app downloads in the United States this week, a signal of growing interest from consumers siding with Anthropic in its standoff with the Pentagon, according to market research firm Sensor Tower.

The Trump administration on Friday ordered government agencies to stop using Claude and designated it a supply chain risk after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused to bend his company’s ethical safeguards preventing the technology from being applied to autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance. Anthropic has said it will challenge the Pentagon in court once it receives formal notice of the penalties.

And while many military and human rights experts have applauded Amodei for standing up for ethical principles, some are also frustrated by years of AI industry marketing that persuaded the government to apply the technology to high-stakes tasks.

“He caused this mess,” said Missy Cummings, a former Navy fighter pilot who now directs the robotics and automation center at George Mason University. “They were the No. 1 company to push ridiculous hype over the capabilities of these technologies. And now, all of a sudden, they want to be for real. They want to tell people, ‘Oh, wait a minute. We really shouldn’t be using these technologies in weapons.’”

FILE – Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, attends the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)

Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The Defense Department declined to comment on whether it is still using Claude, including in the Iran war, citing operational security.

Cummings published a paper at a top AI conference in December arguing that government agencies should prohibit the use of generative AI “to control, direct, guide or govern any weapon.” Not because AI is so smart that it could go rogue, but because the large language models behind chatbots like Claude make too many mistakes — called hallucinations or confabulations — and are “inherently unreliable and not appropriate in environments that could result in the loss of life.”

“You’re going to kill noncombatants,” Cummings said in an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press. “You’re going to kill your own troops. I’m not clear whether the military truly understands the limitations.”

Amodei sought to emphasize those limitations in defending Anthropic’s ethical stance last week, arguing that “frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk.”

Anthropic, until recently, was the only one of its peers to have approval for use in classified military systems, where it has partnered with data analysis company Palantir and other defense contractors. President Donald Trump said Friday, around the same time he was approving Saturday’s military strikes on Iran, that the Pentagon would have six months to phase out Anthropic’s military applications.

Cummings, a former Palantir adviser, said it’s possible that Claude has already been used in military strike planning.

“I just fundamentally hope that there were humans in the loop,” she said. “A human has to babysit these technologies very closely. You can use them to do these things, but you need to verify, verify, verify.”

She said that’s a contrast to the messaging from AI companies that have suggested that their technology is evolving to the point where it is “almost sentient.”

“If there’s culpability here, I’d say half is Anthropic’s for driving the hype and half is the Department of War’s fault for firing all the people that would have otherwise advised them against stupid uses of technology,” Cummings said.

One social media commentator this week described Anthropic’s government problems as a “Hype Tax” — a message that was reposted by President Donald Trump’s top AI adviser, David Sacks, a frequent critic of the company.

And while it has caused legal hassles that could jeopardize Anthropic’s business partnerships with other military contractors, it has also bolstered its reputation as a safety-minded AI developer.

“It’s applaudable that a company stood up to the government in order to maintain what it felt were its ethics and were its business choices, even in the face of these potentially crippling policy responses,” said Jennifer Huddleston, a senior fellow at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.

Consumers have already spoken, leading to a surge of Claude downloads that made it the most popular iPhone app starting on Saturday and for all phone systems in the U.S. on Monday, according to Sensor Tower. That’s come at the expense of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which saw its consumer reputation damaged when it announced a Friday deal with the Pentagon to effectively replace Anthropic with ChatGPT in classified environments.

In the Apple store, the number of 1-star reviews — the worst rating — of ChatGPT grew by 775% on Saturday and continued to grow early this week, forcing OpenAI to do damage control.

“We shouldn’t have rushed to get this out on Friday,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a social media post Monday. “The issues are super complex, and demand clear communication. We were genuinely trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome, but I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy.”

Altman was planning to gather employees for an “all-hands” meeting on Tuesday to discuss next steps.

“There are many things the technology just isn’t ready for, and many areas we don’t yet understand the tradeoffs required for safety,” Altman said. “We will work through these, slowly, with the (Pentagon), with technical safeguards and other methods.”

By MEG KINNARD

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — The House Ethics Committee has opened an investigation into allegations that Rep. Nancy Mace overcharged a congressional program intended to help defray housing costs for lawmakers who have residences in Washington.

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Mace, a South Carolina Republican now in her third House term, denies the allegations, decrying a “partisan” process and saying officials had “ignored” her rebuttal evidence.

The Office of Congressional Conduct, after an investigation, said it believes that “there is substantial reason to believe that Rep. Mace engaged in improper reimbursement practices.” The office sent its findings to the Ethics panel for review.

Mace took part in a program that helps members of Congress defray the costs of their bifurcated existences between Washington and their home districts, subsidizing food, travel and lodging expenses. During 2023 and 2024, her second term in office, the report alleges Mace recouped about $9,500, “more than the true costs” for the Washington home she shared with her then-fiancé.

Noting that Mace “refused to interview” as part of its probe, the office said it “was unable to determine how or why Rep. Mace decided to seek the maximum allowable reimbursement when it exceeded her expenses incurred.”

Allowing that “Mace’s lodging expenses may have exceeded the maximum allowable reimbursement for some months,” the report said that its available evidence “suggests Rep. Mace did not take appropriate measures to ensure she sought reimbursement for expenses actually incurred.”

In a December letter filed with the committee, an attorney for Mace wrote that the congresswoman’s former fiancé, with whom she ended her relationship in late 2023, had been “engaged in an ongoing campaign to discredit and injure the Congresswoman through false narratives and misuse of legal process, and that any information originating from them would raise serious credibility concerns.”

Despite that, attorney William Sullivan Jr. said the office declined to disclose if the former fiancé had been involved with the investigation. He said the referral to Ethics “appears to rely heavily on unverified materials originating from individuals with personal or adversarial motives.”

GOP Rep. Michael Guest of Florida, chairman of the Ethics Committee, said the referral about Mace was received in December. The committee’s decision to investigate is not evidence of wrongdoing, and Guest pointed out that the committee wouldn’t make further comment until it completes an investigation.

Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP

A Farmington woman was critically injured when authorities say she pulled out in front of a police vehicle with its emergency lights and sirens activated, according to the Minnesota State Patrol.

The crash occurred shortly after 5:30 p.m. Monday on southbound Minnesota 3 at Elm Street in Farmington.

A state patrol report said the 2022 Ford Explorer Farmington Police Department squad car was heading southbound on 3 with the vehicle’s emergency lights and sirens on when it struck a 2016 Toyota Corolla that entered the intersection from eastbound Elm Street.

The police officer was taken to Regions Hospital with non-life threatening injuries. The 72-year-old driver of the Corolla was taken to Regions Hospital with life-threatening injuries.

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