Talk show host Stephen Colbert said CBS forbade him from interviewing Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico because of a Federal Communications Commission threat to enforce the equal-time rule on late-night and daytime talk shows.

Talarico "was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network's lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast," Colbert said on last night's episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. "Then I was told in some uncertain terms that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on, and because my network clearly doesn't want us to talk about this, let's talk about this."

Colbert went on to describe some of the background Ars readers are already familiar with. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr recently issued a warning to late-night and daytime talk shows that they may no longer qualify for the bona fide news exemption to the equal-time rule, and subsequently opened an investigation into ABC’s The View after an interview with Talarico.

Formally known as the Equal Opportunities Rule, the rule generally requires that stations giving time to one political candidate provide comparable time and placement to opposing candidates if any opposing candidate makes a request. The rule has an exemption for candidate appearances on bona fide news programs, and entertainment talk shows have generally been treated as bona fide news programs for this purpose.

The equal-time rule is "the FCC's most time-honored rule, right after 'no nipples at the Super Bowl,'" Colbert said. Carr's recent letter "said he was thinking about dropping the exception for talk shows because he said some of them were motivated by partisan purposes," Colbert said, while accusing Carr of being motivated by partisan purposes himself.

"Let's just call this what it is: Donald Trump's administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV because all Trump does is watch TV. He's like a toddler with too much screen time," Colbert said. Colbert also said he's not allowed to show a photo of Talarico, but simultaneously showed a photo of the candidate.

Colbert put interview on YouTube

Colbert played audio of a recent Carr interview in which the FCC chairman said, "If [Jimmy] Kimmel and Colbert want to continue to do their programming, they don't want to have to comply with this requirement, then they can go to a cable channel or a podcast or a streaming service and that's fine."

Colbert said he "decided to take Brendan Carr's advice" and interviewed Talarico for a segment posted on his show's YouTube channel. "The network says I can't give you a URL or a QR code but I promise you if you go to our YouTube page, you'll find it," Colbert said. That interview is available here.

Colbert described the unequal treatment of late-night talk shows and talk radio. "Carr here claims he's just getting partisanship off the airwaves but the FCC is also in charge of regulating radio broadcasts. And what would you know, Brendan Carr says right-wing talk radio isn't a target of the FCC's equal time notice," Colbert said.

Colbert pointed out that a mere threat, and not an actual rule change, caused CBS to forbid him from interviewing a candidate. "At this point, he's just released a letter that says he's thinking about doing away with the exception for late night, he hasn't done away with it yet," Colbert said. "But my network is unilaterally enforcing it as if he had. But I want to assure you this decision is for purely financial reasons."

We contacted CBS and Paramount today and will update this article if we get a response.

Colbert pushed out after "big fat bribe" comment

Colbert's tenure as host is scheduled to end in May. CBS announced it would end the show last year after Colbert called CBS owner Paramount's $16 million settlement with Trump “a big fat bribe.” Paramount subsequently won FCC approval of an $8 billion merger with Skydance, while agreeing to Carr's demand to install a "bias monitor."

FCC Democrat Anna Gomez said today that CBS forbidding the interview with Talarico "is yet another troubling example of corporate capitulation in the face of this administration’s broader campaign to censor and control speech. The FCC has no lawful authority to pressure broadcasters for political purposes or to create a climate that chills free expression. CBS is fully protected under the First Amendment to determine what interviews it airs, which makes its decision to yield to political pressure all the more disappointing."

Gomez said Paramount "has regulatory matters before the government, but corporate interests cannot justify retreating from airing newsworthy content." She urged broadcasters "to stand firm against these unlawful pressures and continue exercising their constitutional right to speak freely and without government interference.”

"Disgraceful behavior" by CBS and Carr

Harold Feld, a longtime telecom attorney who is senior VP of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, said today that "if what Colbert says is true, CBS needs new lawyers. Even the strictest reading of the equal time rule doesn’t prevent someone from saying the name of a candidate or talking about a URL. Even if the rule applied, CBS would not be required to offer an equal opportunity to Republican candidates at this time. Because Rep. Talarico is still a candidate in the primary, only his two primary opponents—Rep. Jasmine Crocket (D-Texas) and Ahmad Hassan—are entitled to equal opportunity. Nor did CBS have any responsibility to offer equal time to them; candidates must make a request on their own."

Feld called the incident "disgraceful behavior by both CBS and the chairman of the FCC.” With the FCC targeting late-night TV but not talk radio, Feld said it appears that "broadcast appearances by Trump-friendly candidates will continue to receive exemptions from this rule while appearances by Trump-disapproved candidates will not." Paramount's capitulation seems to be more about "finding an excuse to curry favor with President Trump, rather than any concern over the equal time rule," he said.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) said that "candidate interviews have long been exempt from 'equal time' rules for good reason. It would be wrong if a Democratic administration demanded conservative talk radio hosts give equal airtime when they interview candidates, and it’s wrong for the Trump administration to demand the same of late night talk show hosts."

FIRE Chief Counsel Robert Corn-Revere said that by "putting pressure on late night talk shows critical of the Trump administration while openly admitting that conservative talk radio is immune from the FCC’s ire," Carr is "making himself the poster boy for big government putting its thumb on the scale of political debate."

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Michigan is taking on major oil and gas companies in court, joining nearly a dozen other states that have brought climate-related lawsuits against ExxonMobil and its industry peers. But Michigan’s approach is different: accusing Big Oil not of deceiving consumers or misrepresenting climate change risks, but of driving up energy costs by colluding to suppress competition from cleaner and cheaper technologies like solar power and electric vehicles.

The strategy is risky and might run into challenges, but it could potentially be a game changer if the state can overcome initial dismissal attempts by the industry defendants, legal experts say.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed the lawsuit last month in federal District Court against BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and the American Petroleum Institute. The suit, brought under federal and state antitrust laws, alleges a conspiracy to delay the transition to renewable energy and EVs and maintain market dominance of fossil fuels.

Exxon said in a statement that the state’s action is “yet another legally incoherent effort to regulate by lawsuit. It won’t reduce emissions, it won’t help consumers, and it won’t stand up to the law.”

Chevron did not respond to a request for comment, and BP and Shell declined to comment.

API senior vice president and general counsel Ryan Meyers said that Michigan’s case is “baseless” and “part of a coordinated campaign against an industry that powers everyday life, drives America’s economy, and is actively reducing emissions.”

“We continue to believe that energy policy belongs in Congress, not a patchwork of courtrooms,” Meyers added.

This week during a congressional hearing with Attorney General Pam Bondi testifying, U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) referenced Michigan’s lawsuit in arguing that these “novel approaches” to “climate lawfare” require a federal response. Hageman said she is working with House and Senate colleagues to craft legislation aimed at shielding fossil fuel companies from state climate liability laws and lawsuits.

API has been lobbying Congress on exactly this kind of liability shield. The organization has recently lobbied on “draft legislation related to state efforts to impose liability on the oil and gas industry,” according to its lobbying reports. And API is now stating publicly that stopping “extreme climate liability policy” such as lawsuits and state climate superfund laws is one of its top priorities for 2026.

In its lawsuit, Michigan argues that the oil companies and their chief trade association operated as a cartel, working to hinder the development of alternatives in the primary energy and transportation markets in order to keep consumers dependent upon oil and gas. This anticompetitive conduct, the state says, has resulted in fewer choices for consumers when it comes to fueling their cars or heating their homes, and has left consumers paying more for energy than they otherwise would have.

The lawsuit comes at a time of mounting concerns over affordability and the cost of living, including rising energy costs. Nessel said these “out-of-control costs” are largely “due to the greed of these corporations who prioritized their own profit and marketplace dominance over competition and consumer savings.”

According to the state’s complaint, clean energy technologies would have reached scale much sooner, and consumers would have avoided billions of dollars in overcharges, were it not for the defendants’ deliberate actions to forestall their development and deployment.

“Defendants have dramatically delayed the availability of EVs, made 100 percent clean charging stations a rarity, suppressed the advancement of solar technology and its uptake by consumers, and prolonged fossil fuels’ dominance in mixed-source electricity generation,” the complaint argues.

The lawsuit details allegations of coordinated anticompetitive conduct, such as abandoning research and investments in alternative energy technologies and using patent litigation to stifle innovation. Exxon, which invented an early version of the lithium-ion battery, halted its EV battery research program in the early 1980s, while Chevron worked to block commercialization of a nickel-metal hydride battery technology.

Oil companies were also early developers of the solar energy market and controlled much of the sector in the 1980s. But then they abandoned these ventures and, according to the complaint, “used litigation to deter new market entrants.” As attorney Tracy Emblem wrote in a 2010 article, big oil companies “seized and took control of the research and patents” for PV solar in order to thwart its development.

Oil companies understood the threat posed to their business by a large-scale transition away from fossil fuels, the Michigan lawsuit says, and therefore they worked together to try to block alternatives from taking off and to ultimately delay the transition.

The complaint cites a 1979 internal study by Exxon finding that alternatives to fossil fuels would need to account for at least half of global energy supply by 2010 in order to avoid catastrophic climate impacts. That same year, API established a CO2 and Climate Task Force, and through this task force the defendants “reached a consensus to restrain innovation and coordinate efforts to delay the inevitable energy transition,” the complaint alleges.

Proving there was an actual conspiracy or an agreement among the companies, however, is likely to be one of the biggest challenges for the state, legal experts say.

“In establishing an antitrust claim, essentially a conspiracy, you need to prove an agreement,” Gary Mouw, partner at the Michigan-based law firm Varnum LLP, told Inside Climate News. “You need to allege sufficient facts, specific concrete facts where it can be concluded or interpreted that these parties actually entered into an agreement to coordinate.”

He said he expects the defendants will argue that the allegations lack specificity and that there was no established consensus to collude.

Pat Parenteau, emeritus professor of law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, agreed that proving the alleged conspiracy might be the biggest sticking point for the state plaintiffs.

“They’ve really got to nail down, what is the overt evidence of the conspiracy to constrain trade? What documents reveal these parties getting together and agreeing that we’re going to choke renewables?” Parenteau told Inside Climate News.

“The theories are solid,” he added. “Surviving a motion to dismiss is the ball game, I think. If [the state] can get past a motion to dismiss, get into discovery, get to trial, then they’ve got a shot.”

Michigan is not the first to allege that fossil fuel companies engaged in conspiratorial conduct. California, for example, which sued a handful of major oil and gas firms in 2023, argued that the companies conspired to misrepresent the known dangers of fossil fuels and to disseminate climate disinformation while promoting continued use of fossil fuel products.

Several other lawsuits filed against the industry include racketeering and related conspiracy claims. One of these cases, filed in 2022 by Puerto Rican municipalities, also brought a federal antitrust claim against fossil fuel companies. While a magistrate judge had recommended that the case should proceed under racketeering and antitrust claims, a federal district court judge decided to dismiss the case in September based on a procedural statute of limitations issue. The Puerto Rican municipalities are appealing that decision.

Mouw said he expects that defendants in the Michigan lawsuit will likely raise a similar statute of limitations defense, essentially arguing that the claims were not brought in a timely manner.

But while Puerto Rico’s lawsuit sought to hold fossil fuel companies liable for damages stemming from the 2017 hurricanes that decimated the island, Michigan’s case is less focused around a specific event, Aaron Regunberg, a lawyer and director of Public Citizen’s climate accountability project, explained. “It is an ongoing conspiracy with ongoing harms,” he told Inside Climate News. “I think it’s better insulated from a statute of limitations argument.”

Regunberg said he thinks the approach of bringing antitrust claims against Big Oil for delaying the energy transition is compelling and appropriate.

“It really gets at the fundamental thing that Big Oil was trying to do,” he said. “Ultimately it was about shutting out competitors, keeping their energy cartel dominant over the market, in order to keep us locked into their products and keep alternative clean energy from reaching scale.”

Zephyr Teachout, a law professor at Fordham Law School with expertise in antitrust law, told Inside Climate News that Michigan’s case looks very promising.

“For generations fossil fuel companies have engaged in cartel-like behaviors to suppress innovation and lock down the flow of cash,” she said. “They hide in trade associations but there’s no free speech protection for cartels, and I’m glad to see the case.”

The push to wipe out climate liability

Michigan’s lawsuit comes amidst escalating attempts by the fossil fuel industry and its political allies to shut down climate liability initiatives.

“As more than a dozen states and communities move closer to putting Big Oil on trial, and as climate superfund laws begin to take hold, the industry is turning to Congress for protection. API has said plainly that stopping climate liability is a top priority and now we are seeing legislation take shape to do exactly that,” Cassidy DiPaola, communications director for the Make Polluters Pay campaign, said in response to Hageman’s announcement that she is working with congressional colleagues to craft a federal liability shield for energy companies.

“If these companies believe they did nothing wrong, they should be willing to defend that position in court,” DiPaola added. “Instead, they are asking lawmakers to block the cases altogether.”

State lawmakers in Utah and Oklahoma recently introduced bills that aim to shield the fossil fuel industry from climate lawsuits and prohibit liability over climate damages. Both bills are currently advancing in the state legislatures.

In April 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the attorney general to identify and “expeditiously take all appropriate action to stop” state laws and lawsuits that burden domestic fossil fuel production or otherwise target the fossil fuel industry.

Just weeks later, the U.S. Department of Justice sued New York and Vermont over their climate superfund laws. The DOJ also preemptively sued Hawaii and Michigan in anticipation of those states bringing climate lawsuits against oil companies, even though neither state had filed any case at the time. Hawaii did file a complaint against oil companies the next day.

Michigan, however, did not file its suit until just recently, and it ended up departing from the expected focus on climate damages. The DOJ argued in its complaint that Michigan’s forthcoming suit would be unconstitutional and preempted by the Clean Air Act. U.S. District Judge Jane M. Beckering, who is now presiding over Michigan’s antitrust lawsuit, tossed out the DOJ’s case the day after the state filed its suit against Big Oil.

Beckering said the DOJ’s case was too speculative and premature, and that there appeared to be no precedent for preemptively blocking a party from bringing “a broad swath of unspecified claims against unspecified members of a given industry simply because that party has begun investigating whether a litigation strategy may have merit.”

“I am relieved the Court saw through this and dismissed this frivolous case,” Nessel, the Michigan attorney general, said in response. “My office will not be bullied.”

Nessel put out a request for outside counsel in 2024 to assist with pursuing climate litigation against fossil fuel companies, and the state subsequently entered into contingency contracts with the law firms Sher Edling, DiCello Levitt and Hausfeld. What had started as an investigative strategy of holding fossil fuel companies liable for climate impacts in the state, however, instead “uncovered one of the most successful antitrust conspiracies in United States history,” according to Nessel’s office.

Antitrust experts say the state’s case takes a novel approach, and one that tests the bounds of traditional antitrust law.

“I think there are some challenges here, especially when the court looks at what else would this apply to if we were to adopt this theory: Would this really expand liability for antitrust beyond what it was really meant for?” Mouw said.

“The Michigan case is a novel application of a classic principle of the antitrust laws—that agreements between competitors to restrict output are illegal,” Nicole Veno, an antitrust lawyer and senior associate at Lowey Dannenberg, told Inside Climate News. “While the theory of liability appears strong, to prove damages Michigan will also need to show that it was economically harmed by the failure to invest in alternative energy sources, which could prove more challenging.”

If the case does move ahead, climate advocates say they are hopeful that it will open up new pathways for pursuing accountability.

“I’m excited to see how this case goes,” Public Citizen’s Regunberg said, “and would hope it would be a model for a lot of other plaintiffs who are hopefully going to be bringing more suits like it.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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On Wednesday, former OpenAI researcher Zoë Hitzig published a guest essay in The New York Times announcing that she resigned from the company on Monday, the same day OpenAI began testing advertisements inside ChatGPT. Hitzig, an economist and published poet who holds a junior fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows, spent two years at OpenAI helping shape how its AI models were built and priced. She wrote that OpenAI's advertising strategy risks repeating the same mistakes that Facebook made a decade ago.

"I once believed I could help the people building A.I. get ahead of the problems it would create," Hitzig wrote. "This week confirmed my slow realization that OpenAI seems to have stopped asking the questions I'd joined to help answer."

Hitzig did not call advertising itself immoral. Instead, she argued that the nature of the data at stake makes ChatGPT ads especially risky. Users have shared medical fears, relationship problems, and religious beliefs with the chatbot, she wrote, often "because people believed they were talking to something that had no ulterior agenda." She called this accumulated record of personal disclosures "an archive of human candor that has no precedent."

She also drew a direct parallel to Facebook's early history, noting that the social media company once promised users control over their data and the ability to vote on policy changes. Those pledges eroded over time, Hitzig wrote, and the Federal Trade Commission found that privacy changes Facebook marketed as giving users more control actually did the opposite.

She warned that a similar trajectory could play out with ChatGPT: "I believe the first iteration of ads will probably follow those principles. But I'm worried subsequent iterations won't, because the company is building an economic engine that creates strong incentives to override its own rules."

Ads arrive after a week of AI industry sparring

Hitzig's resignation adds another voice to a growing debate over advertising in AI chatbots. OpenAI announced in January that it would begin testing ads in the US for users on its free and $8-per-month "Go" subscription tiers, while paid Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education subscribers would not see ads. The company said ads would appear at the bottom of ChatGPT responses, be clearly labeled, and would not influence the chatbot's answers.

The rollout on Sunday followed a week of public jabs between OpenAI and its rival, Anthropic. Anthropic declared Claude would remain ad-free, then ran Super Bowl ads with the tagline "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude," which depicted AI chatbots awkwardly inserting product placements into personal conversations.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the ads "funny" but "clearly dishonest," writing on X that OpenAI "would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them." He framed the ad-supported model as a way to bring AI to users who cannot afford subscriptions, writing that "Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people."

Anthropic responded as part of an advertising campaign of its own that including ads in conversations with its Claude chatbot "would be incompatible with what we want Claude to be: a genuinely helpful assistant for work and for deep thinking." The company said more than 80 percent of its revenue comes from enterprise customers.

What Hitzig saw from the inside

Regardless of the debate over whether AI chatbots should carry ads, OpenAI's support documentation reveals that ad personalization is enabled by default for users in the test. If left on, ads will be selected using information from current and past chat threads, as well as past ad interactions. Advertisers do not receive users' chats or personal details, OpenAI says, and ads will not appear near conversations about health, mental health, or politics.

In her essay, Hitzig pointed to what she called an existing tension in OpenAI's principles. She noted that while the company states it does not optimize for user activity solely to generate advertising revenue, reporting has suggested that OpenAI already optimizes for daily active users, "likely by encouraging the model to be more flattering and sycophantic."

She warned that this optimization can make users feel more dependent on AI models for support, pointing to psychiatrists who have documented instances of "chatbot psychosis" and allegations that ChatGPT reinforced suicidal ideation.

OpenAI currently faces multiple wrongful death lawsuits, including one alleging ChatGPT helped a teenager plan his suicide and another alleging it validated a man's paranoid delusions about his mother before a murder-suicide.

Rather than framing the debate as ads versus no ads, Hitzig proposed several structural alternatives. These included cross-subsidies modeled on the FCC's universal service fund (where businesses paying for high-value AI labor would subsidize free access for others), independent oversight boards with binding authority over how conversational data gets used in ad targeting, and data trusts or cooperatives where users retain control of their information. She pointed to the Swiss cooperative MIDATA and Germany's co-determination laws as partial precedents.

Hitzig closed her essay with what she described as the two outcomes she fears most: "a technology that manipulates the people who use it at no cost, and one that exclusively benefits the few who can afford to use it."

A changing of the AI seasons

Hitzig was not the only prominent AI researcher to publicly resign this week. On Sunday, Mrinank Sharma, who led Anthropic's Safeguards Research Team and co-authored a widely cited 2023 study on AI sycophancy, announced his departure in a letter warning that "the world is in peril." He wrote that he had "repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions" inside the organization and said he plans to pursue a poetry degree (Hitzig, coincidentally, is also a published poet).

On Monday, xAI co-founder Yuhuai "Tony" Wu also resigned, followed the next day by fellow co-founder Jimmy Ba. They were part of a larger wave: at least nine xAI employees, including the two co-founders, publicly announced their departures over the past week, according to TechCrunch. Six of the company's 12 original co-founders have now left.

The departures follow Elon Musk's decision to merge xAI with SpaceX in an all-stock deal ahead of a planned IPO, a transaction that converted xAI equity into shares of a company valued at $1.25 trillion, though it is unclear whether the timing of the departures is related to vesting schedules.

The three sets of departures across OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI appear unrelated in their specifics, but they arrive during a period of rapid commercialization across the AI industry that has tested the patience of researchers at multiple companies, and they fit a broader pattern of turnover and burnout that has become common at major AI labs.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A moderator on diyAudio set up an experiment to determine whether listeners could differentiate between audio run through pro audio copper wire, a banana, and wet mud. Spoiler alert: the results indicated that users were unable to accurately distinguish between these different 'interfaces.' Pano, the moderator who built the experiment, invited other members on the forum to listen to various sound clips with four different versions: one taken from the original CD file, with the three others recorded through 180cm of pro audio copper wire, via 20cm of wet mud, through 120cm of old microphone cable soldered to US pennies, and via a 13cm banana, and 120cm of the same setup as earlier. Initial test results showed that it's extremely difficult for listeners to correctly pick out which audio track used which wiring setup. "The amazing thing is how much alike these files sound. The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn't," Pano said. "All of the re-recordings should be obvious, but they aren't."

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Up to a third of people worldwide have shoulder pain; it's one of the most common musculoskeletal complaints. But medical imaging might not reveal the problem -- in fact, it could even cloud it. From a report: In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week, 99 percent of adults over 40 were found to have at least one abnormality in a rotator cuff on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The rotator cuff is the group of muscles and tendons in a shoulder joint that keeps the upper arm bone securely in the shoulder socket -- and is often blamed for pain and other symptoms. The trouble is, the vast majority of the people in the study had no problems with their shoulders. The finding calls into question the growing use of MRIs to try to diagnose shoulder pain -- and, in turn, the growing problem of overtreatment of rotator cuff (RC) abnormalities, which includes partial- and full-thickness tears as well as signs of tendinopathy (tendon swelling and thickening). "While we cannot dismiss the possibility that some RC tears may contribute to shoulder symptoms, our findings indicate that we are currently unable to distinguish clinically meaningful MRI abnormalities from incidental findings," the study authors concluded.

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China's courts are now handling more than 550,000 intellectual-property cases a year -- making it the world's most litigious country for IP disputes -- as the nation's own companies, once notorious for copying foreign designs and technology, find themselves on the defensive against a domestic counterfeiting epidemic fueled by excess factory capacity. The problem runs from knockoff "Lafufu" plush toys (cheap copies of Pop Mart's wildly popular Labubu dolls, which prompted a nationwide crackdown and a Shanghai police bust of a $1.7 million stash in July) to copied motorcycles and solar panels. Judges in Shanghai, the preferred venue for IP litigation, are working through cases at a rate of roughly one per day, and it still takes three months for a case to land on a court's docket. Chinese companies are also increasingly clashing abroad: patent-related cases involving Chinese businesses in America surged 56% in 2023, according to data from GEN, a Chinese law firm. Luckin Coffee and Trina Solar have both filed suits against foreign-based copycats.

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