New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks at a press conference at Gracie Mansion in New York City, on Jan. 12, 2026.
New York mayor says terminating the ‘unusable’ bot will help close a budget gap By Colin Lecher and Katie Honan, THE CITY
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In a press conference this week on New York City’s $12 billion budget gap, Mayor Zohran Mamdani zeroed in on the previous administration’s artificial intelligence chatbot as one of “a number of different things we’re going to pursue for savings.”
The chatbot, which was released by the Eric Adams administration in fall of 2023, was meant to provide business owners with an accessible way to check city rules and regulations. But as first documented by The Markup and THE CITY, the bot provided answers that, if followed, would lead to illegal behavior by businesses, like taking a cut of employees’ tips.
A spokesperson for the mayor, Dora Pekec, confirmed in a text message that the new administration plans to take down the chatbot. She said a member of the Mamdani transition team had seen reporting on the bot from The Markup and THE CITY and presented it to the mayor as a possible place to save funds.
At the press conference, Mamdani blamed Adams for the budget shortfall, saying he had been handed “a poisoned chalice.” To close the deficit, he said he would raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations and look “under the hood” of the city’s budget for potential savings.
When pressed by reporters on what he might cut, he singled out the chatbot.
“The previous administration had an AI chatbot that was functionally unusable,” Mamdani said. “It was costing the administration around half a million dollars. That, in and of itself, is not something that can bridge this kind of a gap, but it’s an indication of the ways in which money has been spent while refusing to account for the actual costs of what these programs are.”
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