The U.S. Justice Department cleared the way for Paramount Skydance’s $111-billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery — a major milestone that moves David Ellison closer to his goal.

After a months-long review, Justice Department antitrust regulators on Friday concluded the combination would not violate federal anti-competition laws. Approval had been expected because President Trump — who has friendly ties with Ellison and his father, tech billionaire Larry Ellison — favors the deal.

The government stopped short of asking Paramount to make concessions or divestitures.

Antitrust regulators found that “based on the evidence received in its investigation … the transaction is not likely to result in harm to competition or American consumers,” the Justice Department division said in a statement.

They looked at whether the merger would give Paramount too much power in the streaming video on demand market; the linear television channel space and “studio development, production, or distribution of films for theatrical release” but did not find potential antitrust violations, the Justice Department said.

Ellison has promised to continue releasing 30 films a year with a combined Warner Bros.-Paramount studio.

“We are grateful for the Department of Justice’s thorough review of this transaction, as well as the work of the other agencies that have completed their reviews and provided clearance to date,” Paramount said in a statement.

“This deal is pro-competitive, resulting in a stronger company better positioned to compete against dominant technology platforms in an industry increasingly defined by intense competition for audiences, talent, technology, and investment. We remain focused on completing the transaction as soon as possible and delivering its benefits to consumers, creators, and the entertainment industry as a whole,” Paramount said.

Paramount wants to finalize its purchase by September.

With Friday’s victory, Paramount is staying on that timetable, but regulators in Europe and Britain have opened their own regulatory investigations and are expected to make their own determinations in the coming months.

Separately, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and other state attorneys general have been scrutinizing the proposed merger, and are widely expected to file a lawsuit, perhaps as early as this month, to try to block it.

Paramount applied for the Justice Department’s approval in December — more than two months before it edged out Netflix in the Warner sweepstakes.

Buying Warner Bros. would allow Paramount — Hollywood’s smallest major company — to bulk up with such prestigious properties as HBO, CNN, HGTV and Food Network. Those would be combined with properties Paramount already owns, including CBS, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and MTV.

The deal would put two historic film studios, and two prominent news organizations under the same roof. It would give Paramount four streaming services, including HBO Max, and dozens of cable channels.

Justice Department approval could complicate efforts by Bonta and other state attorneys general to block the deal. Should Bonta or others sue, they would have to convince a judge that the nation’s top antitrust regulators failed to make a proper finding.

That may pose a high bar for the state officials, who are facing political pressure to stop the deal.

“State AGs must block this merger,” U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a statement Friday, adding that the Justice Department‘s approval was “terrible news for every American who doesn’t want Trump-aligned billionaires to control what they watch and how much they pay.”

As the use of artificial intelligence spreads across companies worldwide, it is relieving workers of tedious old chores but creating new ones.

A new survey of individuals using AI found it made them more productive, saving each roughly 11 hours per week. But at the same time, the workers on average have to spend more than six hours “botsitting,” checking the AI output, fixing mistakes and rerunning the prompt.

“Most people don’t realize the amount of time that they’re spending working on the tools to get the time savings that they’re professing,” said Paul Leonardi, Duca Family professor of technology management at UC Santa Barbara.

Leonardi is one of the co-authors of the new study published by the Work AI Institute, whose contributors include academics from Stanford University and UC Berkeley. The institute is sponsored by AI company Glean. Leonardi said its research output maps broad trends in understanding AI’s impact on work.

The research surveyed 6,000 digital workers across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia between December and January.

The report found that we are in a phase of significant personal productivity gains, but few companies are translating these gains into revenue and business growth.

While 75% of individuals reported a boost in productivity, only 13% of the organizations say they have seen significant business gains as a result of AI adoption, the survey found.

The survey analyzed anonymized, aggregated workplace data from companies using the Glean Work AI platform, a private search tool used to manage their internal information.

Over the past six months, Silicon Valley companies have been urging their employees to max out their AI use . But the benefits of merely maximizing AI usage have been unclear, with instances such as Uber burning through their entire 2026 AI budget in four months, without shipping a usable feature.

The reason the boost in productivity sometimes leads to waste, Leonardi said, is the time people spend correcting the bot’s work and gathering the right files, documentation, and tacit knowledge required for it to produce high-quality output.

“It’s pretty striking the amount of time and effort people are spending,” Leonardi said.

Most employees now spend over six hours a week of their workday babysitting their work chatbots, the survey said.

There is a “thick, mostly invisible layer of human labor holding the whole thing together,” the report said.

The survey found that for every hour a worker spends getting useful output from AI, they spend roughly another hour making it usable.

Of the total time workers spend interacting with AI each week, 37% goes to botsitting, 36% to actually using the tool to produce work.

Part of the reason so much time disappears into botsitting is how often the tools fall short: Workers report that more than a third of AI sessions fail outright, requiring a full restart or substantial rework.

Paradoxically, as more workers hand over bigger parts of their jobs to AI, they are offloading personal judgment and responsibilities to the bots. The survey found 41% of workers say they sometimes deliver AI-generated work they couldn’t explain if asked.

The report highlighted an example of a junior software engineer, Robin, who pasted thousands of lines of AI-generated code before going to bed. But something in there was broken, which a senior engineer already behind on a deadline had to untangle, while Robin struggled to explain.

“I think what’s happening with a lot of these Gen AI tools right now is we’re essentially expecting individual contributors to act as managers,” Leonardi said. “They’re just managing these AI tools, AI agents, and we’re expecting that they’ll be able to produce way more, but we’re not taking into account all of the work that actually goes into managing.”

This problem isn’t likely to go away.