Americans’ view of the U.S. economy worsened in June, resuming a downward slide that had dragged consumer confidence to its lowest level since the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago.

The Conference Board said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index slid to 93 in June, down 5.4 points from 98.4 last month, which represented a brief uptick.

The regression surprised economists, who had expected a small uptick this month.

In April, American consumers’ confidence in the economy sank to its lowest reading since May 2020, largely due to anxiety over the impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

A measure of Americans’ short-term expectations for their income, business conditions and the job market fell 4.6 points to 69. That’s well below 80, the marker that can signal a recession ahead.

Consumers’ assessments of the present economic situation declined by 6.4 points to 129.1.

Tariffs and the impact they could have on personal finances remained at the top of respondents’ minds, the Conference Board said.

Consumers’ fears of a recession during the next 12 months rose slightly in June and remain elevated, according to the survey results.

The Conference Board said that the three components of the expectations Index — business conditions, job prospects, and future income — all weakened.

It was the sixth straight month that respondents’ views of the job market deteriorated, though the reading remains in positive territory as the U.S. labor market continues to churn out jobs.

Though concerns about inflation ticked down slightly in June, it remains a major concern among respondents, who frequently mentioned higher prices in tandem with tariffs.

The Board said respondents’ references to geopolitics and social unrest increased slightly from previous months, but are still significantly lower on the list of consumers’ concerns.

The deadline for survey responses was June 18, before the U.S. targeted Iranian nuclear sites but after Israel’s bombing of Tehran.

— Associated Press

AI company gets mixed copyright ruling

In a test case for the artificial intelligence industry, a federal judge has ruled that AI company Anthropic didn’t break the law by training its chatbot Claude on millions of copyrighted books.

But the company is still on the hook and must now go to trial over how it acquired those books by downloading them from online “shadow libraries” of pirated copies.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco said in a ruling filed late Monday that the AI system’s distilling from thousands of written works to be able to produce its own passages of text qualified as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law because it was “quintessentially transformative.”

“Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s (AI large language models) trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” Alsup wrote.

But while dismissing a key claim made by the group of authors who sued the company for copyright infringement last year, Alsup also said Anthropic must still go to trial in December over its alleged theft of their works.

“Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library,” Alsup wrote.

Self-driving taxis next to roll in Atlanta

Waymo’s robotaxis will begin carrying passengers through parts of Atlanta on Tuesday in an expansion of a partnership with Uber that began earlier this year in Austin.

Waymo’s driverless march into Atlanta comes just days after Tesla finally launched a limited robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, more than five years after CEO Elon Musk brashly promised the electric automaker would quickly overtake Waymo as the leader in autonomous driving technology. While Tesla is starting with about a dozen supervised robotaxis, Waymo and Uber have dispatched about 100 completely driverless vehicles in Austin less than four months after their partnership began. The expansion into Atlanta keeps the two companies aligned with a road map they laid out last September.

— From news services