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The Supreme Court backed a multibillion-dollar oil railroad expansion in Utah Thursday in a ruling that scales back a key environmental law for projects around the country. The 8-0 decision comes after an appeal to the high court from backers of the project, which is aimed at quadrupling oil production in the remote area of sandstone and sagebrush. Environmental groups said the decision would have sweeping impacts on National Environmental Policy Act reviews. The Trump administration has already said it’s speeding up that process after the president vowed to boost U.S. oil and gas development. The case centers on the Uinta Basin Railway, a proposed 88-mile (142-kilometer) expansion that would connect oil and gas producers to the broader rail network and allow them to access larger markets. Supporters have argued that streamlining environmental reviews would speed up development. The justices reversed a lower court decision and restored a critical approval from federal regulators on the Surface Transportation Board. The project could still face additional legal and regulatory hurdles. Environmental groups and a Colorado county had argued that regulators must consider a broad range of potential impacts when they consider new development, such as increased wildfire risk, the effect of additional crude oil production from the area, and increased refining in Gulf states. The justices, though, found that regulators were right to consider the direct effects of the project, rather than the wider upstream and downstream impact. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that courts should defer to regulators on where to draw the line on what factors to take into account. Four other conservative justices joined his opinion. Simply stated, NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock,” he wrote of the policy act reviews. The goal of the law is to inform agency decision-making, not to paralyze it. The courts conservative majority court has taken steps to curtail the power of federal regulators in other cases, including striking down the decades-old Chevron doctrine that made it easier for the federal government to set a wide range of regulations. Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed with the outcome, but with a narrower legal reasoning. In a decision joined by her two liberal colleagues, she said the court could have simply cleared the way for the railway approval by finding the board didn’t need to take into account any harm caused by the oil that might eventually be carried on the railway. Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate in the case after facing calls to step aside over ties to Philip Anschutz, a Colorado billionaire whose ownership of oil wells in the area means he could benefit if the project goes through. Gorsuch, as a lawyer in private practice, had represented Anschutz. The ruling comes after President Donald Trumps vow to boost U.S. oil and gas drilling and move away from former President Joe Bidens focus on climate change. The administration announced last month that its speeding up environmental reviews of projects required under the same law at the center of the Utah case, compressing a process that typically takes a year or more into just weeks. The court’s decision gives agencies a green light to ignore the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their decisions and avoid confronting them, said Sambhav Sankar, senior vice president of programs at Earthjustice. Wendy Park, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said opponents would continue to fight the Utah project. This disastrous decision to undermine our nations bedrock environmental law means our air and water will be more polluted, the climate and extinction crises will intensify, and people will be less healthy,” she said. The projects public partner applauded the ruling. It represents a turning point for rural Utahbringing safer, sustainable, more efficient transportation options, and opening new doors for investment and economic stability,” said Keith Heaton, director of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition. By Lindsay Whitehurst, Associated Press Associated Press writer Hannah Schoenbaum contributed to this story.
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Donald Trump’s trade war got a lot more complicated Wednesday evening as a little-known, but powerful, federal court, ruled that Trump had exceeded his authority in imposing tariffs and labeled those “Liberation Day” duties illegal. That, effectively, will put the majority of the Trump tariffs on hold. (The Trump administration is appealing the ruling.) It’s the latest zig-zag in what has been a dizzying trade war. Since Trump announced the tariffs on April 2, there have been threats, pauses, potential counter tariffs and no end to stock market volatility. Trump’s frequent walk back of his threats has even led to a new term on Wall Streetthe TACO trade, an acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” So what does this ruling mean for consumers and businessesand the larger trade war? Here’s what you need to know. What did the U.S. Court of International Trade rule? The three-judge panel ruled Trump had exceeded his authority in imposing the tariffs on imported goods under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The court said Trump could only use the emergency powers of the IEEPA to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared. Most of the tariffs that have been announced fail to meet the requirements of the Act, said the court, which deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat. How long did the court give the Trump administration to reverse course on tariffs? The judges, who were appointed by Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and Trump, gave the government 10 days to make the necessary administrative moves to do away with the tariffs. What does the Trump administration plan to do next? The White House has made it clear it will appeal this ruling. Trump could ask the Supreme Court to step in and block the ruling as soon as Friday, according to some reports. In the meantime, the Trump administration is seeking an emergency stay, asking the Court of International Trade to delay enforcement of the ruling would cause immediate irreparable harm to US foreign policy and national security.” Which tariffs would still be in effect? While the ruling blocked tariffs applied under the IEEPA, other import taxes, such as those that were imposed under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, will remain. That means the 25% tariffs on specific products such as automobiles, auto parts, steel and aluminum are still in effect, so prices on most vehicles are likely to stay inflated. In addition, the tariffs on specific items from China that were instituted during Trump’s first term (and were expanded under the Biden administration) will remain in effect. Could the tariffs be reinstated? Certainly, if the Trump administration wins its appeal, the tariffs could go back into effect. There are other routes the White House might take as well. Goldman Sachs notes Trump could use Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose tariffs of up to 15%, for up to 150 days. And the U.S. Trade Representative could launch Section 301 investigations on trading partners, which would lay the groundwork for tariffs that have no limits on levels or duration after that investigation is complete. Could prices still go up? Because some tariffs remain in place, prices that have already increased are likely to stay higher. And with the added uncertainty of the ruling, retailers are unlikely to make any immediate changes until the White House announces its next course of action. Several retailers, including Walmart, have warned that tariffs will result in higher prices. Trump has lashed out at some of those, telling them to eat the tariffs How has the stock market reacted to the ruling against Trump’s tariffs? While stocks were broadly higher pre-market (up as much as 500 points on the Dow), the Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P 500 indexes were all largely flat in midday trading, due to the uncertainty that still surrounds tariffs. Traders appear skeptical that weve heard the last of tariffs from the Trump administration.
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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here. Why Im becoming more worried about AI safety During the first two years of the generative AI boom, new large language models were very limited in scope and application. They were very expensive autocomplete engines that understood only words. In 2025 generative AI models have a much broader view of the world. They can process code, images, video, and audio. They can reason and strategize about delivering a good answer. They can control external tools, including digital tools like web search agents and, increasingly, physical tools like robots. As their capabilities grow, so does their potential for harm. This is no longer a purely conceptual argument. Research shows that increasingly large models are already showing a proclivity for unsafe behavior during testing. In a model safety card published last week, Anthropic documented some alarming behavior from its newest and biggest model, Claude 4 Opus. During safety testing, one instance of Opus was allowed to discover plans for its decommissioning. It was also given access to some fictional emails of its developers. The model used the content of those emails as fodder to attempt to blackmail its human handlers into keeping it alive. As its attempts failed, they moved from subtle to more overt. Separately, the independent research firm Apollo Research observed an instance of Claude 4 Opus writing self-propagating worms, fabricating legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to future instances of itself with the goal of sullying its developers intentions. Anthropic says that it corrected these early safety issues in later versions of the model. For the first time, Anthropic bumped the new Opus model up to Level Three on its four-level safety scale. The company said it couldnt rule out the models ability to assist a user in developing a mass casualty weapon. But powerful AI models can work in subtler ways, such as within the information space. A team of Italian researchers found that ChatGPT was more persuasive than humans in 64% of online debates. The AI was also better than humans at leveraging basic demographic data about its human debate partner to adapt and tailor-fit its arguments to be more persuasive. Another worry is the pace at which AI models are learning to develop AI models, potentially leaving human developers in the dust. Many AI developers already use some kind of AI coding assistant to write blocks of code or even code entire features. At a higher level, smaller, task-focused models are distilled from large frontier models. AI-generated content plays a key role in training, including in the reinforcement learning process used to teach models how to reason. Theres a clear profit motive in enabling the use of AI models in more aspects of AI tool development. . . . future systems may be able to independently handle the entire AI development cyclefrom formulating research questions and designing experiments, to implementing, testing, and refining new AI systems, write Daniel Eth and Tom Davidson in a March 2025 blog post on Forethought.org. With slower-thinking humans unable to keep up, a runaway feedback loop could develop in which AI models quickly develop more advanced AI which would itself develop even more advanced AI, resulting in extremely fast AI progress, Eth and Davidson write. Any accuracy or bias issues present in the models would then be baked in and very hard to correct, one researcher told me. Numerous researchersthe people who actually work with the models up closehave called on the AI industry toslow down, but those voices compete with powerful systemic forces that are in motion and hard to stop. Journalist and author Karen Hoa argues that AI labs should focus on creating smaller, task-specific models (she gives Google DeepMinds AlphaFold models as an example), which may help solve immediate problems more quickly, require less natural resources, and pose a smaller safety risk. DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on AlphaFold2, says the huge frontier models are needed to achieve AIs biggest goals (reversing climate change, for example) and to train smaller, more purpose-built models. And yet AlphaFold was not distilled from a larger frontier model. It uses a highly specialized model architecture and was trained specifically for predicting protein structures. The current administration is saying speed up, not slow down. Under the influence of David Sacks and Marc Andreessen, the federal government has largely ceded its power to meaningfully regulate AI development. Just last year AI leaders were still giving lip service to the need for safety and privacy guardrails around big AI models. No more. Any friction has been removed, in the U.S. at least. The promise of this kind of world is one of the main reasons why normally sane and liberal minded opinion leaders jumped on the Trump Train before the electionthe chance to bet big on technologys Next Big Thing in a wild west environment doesnt come along that often. AI job losses: Amodei says the quiet part out loud Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has a stark warning for the developed world about job losses resulting from AI. The CEO told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs. This could cause a 1020% rise in the unemployment rate in the next one to five years, Amodei said. The losses could come from tech, finance, law, consulting, and other white-collar professions, and entry-level jobs could be hit hardest. Tech companies and governments have been in denial on the subject, Amodei says. Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen, Amodei told Axios. It sounds crazy, and people just dont believe it.”\ Similar predictions have made headlines before, but have been narrower in focus. SignalFire research showed that big tech companies hired 25% fewer college graduates in 2024. Microsoft laid off 6,000 people in May, and 40% of the cuts in its home state of Washington were software engineers. CEO Satya Nadella said that AI now generates 2030% of the companys code. A study by the World Bank in February showed that the risk of losing a job to AI is higher for women, urban workers, and those with higher education. The risk of job loss to AI increases with the wealth of the country, the study found. Research: U.S. pulls away from China in generativeAI investments U.S. generative AI companies appear to be attracting more VC money than their Chinese counterparts so far in 2025, says new research from the data analytics company GlobalData. Investments in U.S. AI companies exceeded $50 billion in the first five months of 2025. China, meanwhile, struggles to keep pace due to regulatory headwinds. Many Chinese AI companies are able to get early-stage funding from the Chinese government. GlobalData tracked just 50 funding deals for U.S. companies in 2020, amounting to $800 million of investment. The number grew to more than 600 deals in 2024, valued at more than $39 billion. The research shows 200 U.S. funding deals so far in 2025. Chinese AI companies attracted just $40 million in one deal valued at $40 million in 2020. Deals grew to 39 in 2024, valued at around $400 million. The researchers tracked 14 investment deals for Chinese generative AI companies so far in 2025. This growth trajectory positions the US as a powerhouse in GenAI investment, showcasing a strong commitment to fostering technological advancement, says Global Data analyst Aurojyoti Bose in a statement. Bose cited the well-established venture capital ecosystem in the U.S., along with a permissive regulatory environment, as the main reasons for the investment growth. More AI coverage from Fast Company: 9 of the most out there things Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei just said about AI How AI could supercharge go direct PR, and what the media can do about it This new browser could change everything you know about bookmarks Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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