New York City's MyCity Business Assistant - the chatbot at chat.nyc.gov that answered small-business questions about city rules - told owners they could take a cut of their workers' tips, that they could refuse to accept cash, and that they could turn away tenants who pay their rent with Section 8 housing vouchers. It presented each of those answers as settled city policy.
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Expert: Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York City The MyCity Business Assistant was built to give New York's small-business owners one authoritative answer about city rules. Instead it stated unlawful conduct as settled law. The Markup, working with THE CITY, first caught the bot telling owners they could take a cut of their workers' tips, refuse to accept cash, and turn away tenants paying with Section 8 housing vouchers - each of which is illegal under city, state or federal law. The answers arrived with no hint that anything in them was questionable. That is the specific hazard of a government chatbot: its answers are read as the city's own position. A business owner who acts on a wrong answer does not merely get bad advice - they break the law the city exists to enforce, and the city supplied the instruction. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who took office on 1 January 2026, put the cost at roughly half a million dollars and called the tool 'functionally unusable'. At a press conference on the city's $12 billion budget gap he named the chatbot among the expenses the city would cut. His predecessor, Eric Adams, had defended the system, saying further improvements would make it the best chatbot. The correction: a model that was never validated for legal guidance does not become authoritative because a government puts its seal on it. Answers about legal obligations need a cited source and a review path - not a confident paragraph delivered in the city's voice. Source: https://www.techradar.com/pro/zohran-mamdani-is-set-to-kill-off-new-yorks-functionally-unusable-business-chatbot-which-often-gave-out-illegal-advice
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