But the Supreme Court, which is due to rule soon on the administration’s global tariffs, could provide relief and help revive job growth, he said in a social media post on Sunday.

That comes after the latest monthly jobs report showed payrolls rose by 50,000 in December, while the unemployment rate edged down to 4.4%. For all of 2025, employers added just 584,000 jobs, a sharp decline from 2 million jobs in 2024 and the weakest year outside of a recession since the early 2000s.

Since Trump shocked global markets with his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April, there has been no job growth, Zandi said, adding that subsequent revisions will likely show net declines.

“This reflects the direct effects of the tariffs on manufacturing, transportation and distribution, and ag-related businesses, which are steadily losing jobs, as well as the indirect uncertainty hit to hiring by most other businesses,” he explained.

Indeed, trade-exposed industries suffered steep losses last year. The manufacturing sector, for example, has hemorrhaged 70,000 jobs since April. Tens of thousands have also been lost in mining and logging as well as warehousing.

Meanwhile, the health care and social services are among the few industries that are hiring steadily. Without those two sectors, the U.S. economy would have seen payrolls drop for the year.

“Other factors are certainly at play, including highly restrictive immigration policies, DOGE cuts, and artificial intelligence; however, the global trade war’s fingerprints are all over the ailing job market,” Zandi added. “Thus, the fastest way to boost the job market would be for the Supreme Court to declare the reciprocal tariffs unlawful and for lawmakers to let them become a thing of the past.”

Justices are expected to hand down a decision any day now on Trump’s ability to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

That law has been used for the bulk of Trump’s trade war, including the so-called reciprocal tariffs and fentanyl-related duties. The administration has also leveraged the IEEPA tariffs to secure trade deals with the European Union, Japan, South Korea and others.

But if the Supreme Court rules against Trump, that won’t put an end to his tariff regime. Other levies are based on separate laws and aren’t under consideration at the high court.

New tariffs could also be imposed outside IEEPA, though those would take longer to roll out with some offering only shorter periods to tax imports.

While administration officials have expressed confidence that they have alternate ways to enact tariffs, Trump may not immediately jump at the chance.

As the affordability crisis has become top of mind for lawmakers, Trump has rolled back some duties on coffee, pasta and other staples, while delaying tariffs on furniture.

He’s previously said this information will be used to train X’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok on how to interpret them efficiently.

Earlier this month, Elon Musk reposted a video on X of himself talking about uploading medical data to Grok, saying: “Try it!”

“You can upload your X-rays or MRI images to Grok and it will give you a medical diagnosis,” Musk said in the video, which was uploaded in June. “I have seen cases where it’s actually better than what doctors tell you.

In 2024, Musk said medical images uploaded to Grok would be used to train the bot.

“This is still early stage, but it is already quite accurate and will become extremely good,” Musk wrote on X. “Let us know where Grok gets it right or needs work.”

Musk also claimed in his response Grok saved a man in Norway by diagnosing a problem his doctors failed to notice. The X owner was willing to upload his own medical information to his bot. 

“I did an MRI recently and submitted it to Grok,” Musk said in an episode of the Moonshots with Peter Diamandis podcast released on Tuesday. “None of the doctors nor Grok found anything.”

Musk did not disclose in the podcast why he received an MRI. XAI, which owns X, told Fortune in a statement: “Legacy Media Lies.”

Grok is facing some competition in the AI health space. This week OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health, an experience within the bot feature that allows users to securely connect medical records and wellness apps like MyFitnessPal and Apple Health. The company said it would not train the models using personal medical information.

AI chatbots have become a ubiquitous source of medical information for people. OpenAI reported this week 40 million people seek health information from the model, 55% of which used to bot to look up or better understand symptoms.

Dr. Grok will see you now

So far, Grok’s ability to detect medical abnormalities have been mixed. The AI successfully analyzed blood test results and identified breast cancer, some users claimed. But it also grossly misinterpreted other pieces of information, according to physicians who responded to some of Musk’s about Grok’s ability to interpret medical information. In one instance, Grok mistook a “textbook case” of tuberculosis for a herniated disk or spinal stenosis. In another, the bot mistook a mammogram of a benign breast cyst for an image of testicles.

A May 2025 study found that while all AI models have limitations in processing and predicting medical outcomes, Grok was the most effectively compared to Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT-4o when determining the presence of pathologies in 35,711 slices of brain MRI.

“We know they have the technical capability,” Dr. Laura Heacock, associate professor at the New York University Langone Health Department of Radiology, wrote on X. “Whether or not they want to put in the time, data and [graphics processing units] to include medical imaging is up to them. For now, non-generative AI methods continue to outperform in medical imaging.”

The problems with Dr. Grok

Musk’s lofty goal of training his AI to make medical diagnoses is also a risky one, experts said. While AI has increasingly been used as a means to make complicated science more accessible and create assistive technologies, teaching Grok to use data from a social media platform presents concerns about both Grok’s accuracy and user privacy.

Ryan Tarzy, CEO of health technology firm Avandra Imaging, said in an interview with Fast Company asking users to directly input data, rather than source it from secure databases with de-identified patient data, is Musk’s way of trying to accelerate Grok’s development. Also, the information comes from a limited sample of whoever is willing to upload their images and tests—meaning the AI is not gathering data from sources representative of the broader and more diverse medical landscape.

Medical information shared on social media isn’t bound by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the federal law that protects patients’ private information from being shared without their consent. That means there’s less control over where the information goes after a user chooses to share it.

“This approach has myriad risks, including the accidental sharing of patient identities,” Tarzy said. “Personal health information is ‘burned in’ too many images, such as CT scans, and would inevitably be released in this plan.”

The privacy dangers Grok may present aren’t fully known because X may have privacy protections not known by the public, according to Matthew McCoy, assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He said users share medical information at their own risk.

“As an individual user, would I feel comfortable contributing health data?” he previously told the New York Times. “Absolutely not.”

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on Nov. 20, 2024.

More on AI and health:

The mounting unrest comes as Tehran’s piecemeal efforts to address an economic crisis have done little to appease Iranians. Since protests began late last month, the government has offered words of sympathy, fired the central bank’s chief, and announced plans to provide most people with a monthly payment of about 1 million Iranian tomans—equivalent to $7.

Instead of spending $10 billion annually to subsidize imports, that money will instead go directly to 80 million Iranians in the form of credit to buy certain goods.

But the $7 monthly payments offer little relief to beleaguered consumers who are suffering from food inflation of 64%. It’s made worse by a 60% crash in the currency’s value since June, when Iran and Israel fought a 12-day war that was capped by the U.S. bombing of Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

Now, what began as a protest among merchants in Tehran’s bazaars has spread to students as well as Iran’s working and middle classes all across the country.

The security forces that keep the regime in power have not escaped hardship either. While human rights groups estimate hundreds have died from the government’s crackdown, Iranians say it’s not as severe as it could be.

“Security and law enforcement people are facing the same economic issues and high prices, themselves,” a protester in Tehran told the New York Times. “They are not fighting back wholeheartedly.”

Meanwhile, Trump has threatened Iran if the regime kills protesters and doubled down on that Friday, when he said the U.S. would “start shooting” if authorities fired on demonstrators.

With the violence worsening, Trump is looking at ways to follow through. Reports said that administration officials have already started discussing options to attack Iran again. On Sunday, sources told the Wall Street Journal that Trump will be briefed on Tuesday with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Dan Caine also due to attend.

In addition to military strikes, other options include boosting antigovernment sources online, cyber attacks, and more economic sanctions, the report said.

But the Journal added that the Pentagon hasn’t sent any forces to the region and that the redeployment of the a USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier to South America means there are none in the Middle East or Europe now.

The U.S. raid on Venezuela last week to capture Nicolas Maduro could weigh on military considerations for Iran as a large armada of Navy ships remain in the Caribbean and continue to enforce a “quarantine” on the country’s oil.

But Trump has shown his appetite for more foreign intervention hasn’t abated, even as the reality of a years-long commitment to rebuild Venezuela’s shattered oil industry sets it.

On Sunday, he sent another warning via social media to Cuba, which had benefited from economic assistance when Maduro was in power but is now feeling more strains.

“THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO!” Trump said in a post. “I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”