The pair starred opposite the late legend in Gus Van Sant’s 1997 film, which also earned Williams an Academy Award for best supporting actor. And they will be making the trek up to San Francisco to receive the 9th Robin Williams Legacy of Laughter Award presented to them by Glenn Close‘s nonprofit, Bring Change to Mind, at the organization’s Revels & Revelations Celebration. The fundraiser is set to take place at the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture on April 27.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck pose with Robin Williams and their respective Oscars won for ‘Good Will Hunting’ at the 70th Academy Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on March 23, 1998.
(Photo credit should read HAL GARB/AFP via Getty Images)
Setting the stage for a special night, Affleck and Damon will be presented with their Robin Williams Legacy of Laughter Award by Robin’s children, Zak, Zelda and Cody Williams. It’s an honor designed to recognize “their impact and the power of storytelling and connection to spark real change.”
Affleck and Damon also released a joint statement to The Hollywood Reporter about the news and their friend. “Robin wasn’t just someone we admired. He made our dreams come true. We owe everything to him. He said yes to our movie and we got it made. Receiving the Legacy of Laughter Award, created in honor of Robin Williams, is incredibly meaningful to us. His legacy isn’t just about his talent and how much he made the world laugh — it’s about how deeply he cared. This honor carries his spirit, and that means everything to us,” the duo said.
The event, a milestone moment for Bring Change to Mind as it celebrates 15 years of impact and a decade steering student programming, will also fete philanthropist Pam Baer with a Champion of Change Award to acknowledge her leadership in advancing mental health awareness. The event, supported by lead sponsor American Eagle Foundation, is also supported by individual, foundation and corporate donations. Per official details, it’s already sold out.
Founded by Close in 2010, BC2M is a national organization dedicated to ending the stigma and discrimination surrounding mental illness by working with leading scientists to make a difference in the lives of teens and adults. The cause is personal for Close as her sister, Jessie, lives with bipolar disorder and her nephew, Calen, lives with schizoaffective disorder. The Revels & Revelations Celebration was mounted as a “powerful night of storytelling, celebration and impact” by bringing together advocates, partners and community members under a shared mission of making sure that every young person feels “seen, supported and empowered” to talk openly about mental health.
Williams died by suicide at age 63 on Aug. 11, 2014. His work with the pair on Good Will Hunting left a lasting impact.
“It was the very first day of shooting and Ben and I went to the set. We weren’t working that day and we just saw them rehearse and we were kind of sitting off to the side of the camera,” Damon previously told E! “By the time they said, ‘Action,’ tears were just falling down my face. I couldn’t believe it. I was just looking at Robin start to speak and say these words that Ben and I had just worked on for five years.”
He continued: “After the scene ended, [Robin] came over to us and he saw us. He put his hand on our head and just said, you know, ‘It’s not a fluke. You guys really did this. You really did it.’”
After his passing, they both offered tributes. “Thanks chief — for your friendship and for what you gave the world,” Affleck shared on social media at the time. “Robin brought so much joy into my life and I will carry that joy with me forever,” Damon said in a statement. “He was such a beautiful man. I was lucky to know him and I will never, ever forget him.”
Prior recipients of the Robin Williams Legacy of Laughter Award include Amy Poehler and Ryan Reynolds. Affleck and Damon most recently teamed on The Rip for Netflix. Damon next toplines Christopher Nolan’s star-packed The Odyssey.
First all-women cohort of winners hails from Colombia, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, South Korea, the UK and the US.
This year’s prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize has been awarded to six grassroots environmental activists from around the world for their efforts to fight climate change and save biodiversity.
For the first time since the prize was created in 1989 by philanthropists Richard and Rhoda Goldman, all recipients of the award are women: Iroro Tanshi, from Nigeria; Borim Kim, from South Korea; Sarah Finch, from the United Kingdom; Theonila Roka Matbob, from Papua New Guinea; Alannah Acaq Hurley, from the United States; and Yuvelis Morales Blanco, from Colombia.
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Sometimes described as the “Green Nobel”, the Goldman Prize recipients are chosen from each of the world’s six primary regions. They each receive $200,000 in prize money.
“While we continue to fight uphill to protect the environment and implement lifesaving climate policies – in the US and globally – it is clear that true leaders can be found all around us,” said John Goldman, vice president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation.
“The 2026 Prize winners are proof positive that courage, hard work, and hope go a long way toward creating meaningful progress.”
Yuvelis Morales Blanco, winner of the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize, shows a fish caught on a tour with fishermen along the Magdalena River in Colombia [Handout: Christian EscobarMora/Goldman Environmental Prize]
Morales Blanco, the winner for the region of South and Central America, fought some of the world’s biggest oil companies to successfully stop the introduction of commercial fracking into Colombia.
The 24-year-old grew up in a family of fishermen along the banks of the Magdalena River in the Afro-Colombian community of Puerto Wilches. “We had nothing but the river – she was like a mother who took care of me,” she said.
She began organising protests after a major oil spill in 2018, which forced the relocation of dozens of local families and killed thousands of animals. Her activism, which made her a target for intimidation and forced her to temporarily relocate, helped halt projects and elevate fracking as an issue in Colombia’s 2022 election.
Two of the other five recipients of this year’s prize have also focused their efforts on fighting fossil fuels, which are causing both global climate change and more localised pollution around the world.
Borim, the winner for Asia who started the Youth 4 Climate Action organisation, won a ruling from South Korea’s Constitutional Court that the government’s climate policy violated the constitutional rights of future generations, the first successful youth-led climate litigation in the continent.
Finch, Europe’s winner, told The Times newspaper she will use her prize money to keep fighting fossil fuels.
Together with the Weald Action Group, she fought oil drilling in southeastern England for more than a decade, securing the “Finch ruling” from the Supreme Court in June 2024, stating that authorities must consider fossil fuels’ impacts on the global climate before granting permission to extract them.
Two other recipients have fought against the destructive environmental impact of mining projects.
Papua New Guinea’s Roka Matbob, winner for Islands and Island Nations, led a successful campaign that saw the world’s second-largest mining company, Rio Tinto, agree to address environmental and social devastation caused by its Panguna copper mine, 35 years after it was closed following an uprising.
And the award recipient for North America, Acaq Hurley, from the Yup’ik nation in the US, successfully fought alongside 15 tribal nations to stop a mega- copper and gold mining project that threatened ecosystems in Alaska’s Bristol Bay region, including the largest wild salmon runs in the world.
Meanwhile, Nigeria’s Tanshi, Africa’s winner, rediscovered the endangered short-tailed roundleaf bat and has been working to save its refuge, the Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary, from human-induced wildfires.
U.S. film and TV production in Canada rebounded in 2025 as the local industry finally put the devastating impact of Hollywood’s year of strikes in 2023 in the rearview mirror.
The latest annual economic report from the Canadian Media Producers Association, representing local indie producers, points to foreign location and service production in Canada, mostly by American producers, rising 9.5 percent to CAN$5.32 billion (US$3.9 billion, compared to a year-earlier CAN$4.86 billion.
That production activity includes visual effects work done by Canadian VFX studios for foreign films and TV series. Hollywood production growth was due mainly to TV series production rising 12.1 percent to CAN$3.42 billion (US$2.51 million) and the total volume of other foreign production – including TV movies, specials, pilots and single-episode shoots — increasing by 54.4 percent to CAN$366 million (US$268.2 million).
The overall increase in Hollywood TV production last year offset a 2.2 percent fall in foreign movie production across Canada. The major American players active north of the U.S. border continues to be led by Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and Apple TV+ as they center around production hubs in Toronto and Vancouver.
The big U.S. series to shoot in Canada last year included IT: Welcome to Derry, The Last of Us, Doc and Happy Face, while big budget movies to shoot in Canada included Frankenstein, Tron: Ares and Final Destination: Bloodlines.
Last year’s foreign production rebound was down, however, from the record CAN$6.62 billion in budgetary spending reached in 2023, just before the impact of the Hollywood actors and writers strike was felt by the Canadian industry as local soundstages went dark and production crews were left idle.
The Hollywood industry consolidation and the end of the Peak TV era is also working to reduce American production levels. U.S. film and TV production accounted for 398 projects in Canada last year, or 87 percent of overall foreign location shooting north of the U.S. border, with much of that concentrated in Ontario and British Columbia.
That compares to in all 425 U.S. film and TV series projects shot in Canada in 2024, which represented 86 percent of overall foreign production activity. The rebound in American production last year offset a 2.2 percent fall in local homegrown film and TV series production to $3.62 billion (US$2.65 billion), according to the CMPA report.
The overall volume of production in Canada rose last year by 4.6 percent to CAN$10.17 billion (US$7.54 billion, but that was 15.8 percent down on the peak of CAN$12.07 billion reached in 2023.
London, United Kingdom – Israel, Russia and the United States are leading the destruction of global human rights, Amnesty International has said, describing the three countries’ leaders as “voracious predators” intent upon economic and political domination.
“A global environment where primitive ferocity could flourish has been long in the making,” Agnes Callamard, the head of the global rights group, wrote in an annual report on the state of the world’s human rights that was released on Tuesday.
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In 2025, “sharp U-turns were taken away from the international order that had been imagined out of the ashes of the Holocaust and the utter destruction of world wars, and constructed slowly and painfully, albeit insufficiently, over these past 80 years,” she said.
In a news conference on Monday in London, Callamard said that most governments tend to appease the “predators” rather than confront them.
“Some even thought to imitate the bullies and the looters,” she said.
Spain, however, which is an outlier in Europe for its criticism of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and US-Israeli attacks on Iran, “is standing above the double standard that is destroying the international system”, Callamard said.
She argued that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Donald Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who in 2022 sent his forces into neighbouring Ukraine, have had an “absolutely dramatic” impact on the world.
Their conduct is “emboldening all of those that are tempted by similar behaviours,” said Callamard. “It is allowing for the multiplication of copycats around the world, and therefore what we are confronting now is much more aggressive and ferocious than what we had to confront three or four years ago.”
‘Authoritarian practices have intensified worldwide’
Amnesty’s review of the state of the world’s human rights makes for grim reading, documenting attacks on fundamental civil liberties in most nations.
“Authoritarian practices have intensified worldwide”, the report reads, before running through abuses alleged in countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe in 400 pages.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Russia’s “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine, and the US-Israeli war on Iran were noted as examples of conflict in which international laws have been ignored.
In a section on repression, the United Kingdom is blamed for cracking down on the Palestine solidarity movement and Palestine Action, the direct-action group that targets sites associated with the Israeli military and is currently fighting a legal battle against its UK proscription as a “terrorist” organisation.
Afghanistan’s Taliban was responsible for further gender-based discrimination in 2025, the report noted, citing measures excluding women from education and work, while Nepalese authorities were said to have failed to investigate instances of gender-based violence against Dalit women.
Amnesty’s report comes as multiple conflicts rage across the world.
The US-Israeli assault on Iran has killed more than 3,000 people, while Israeli attacks in Lebanon have killed nearly 2,400. In Gaza, the confirmed number of people killed in Israeli attacks since October 2023 has surpassed 72,500 as the decimated territory is continually threatened by Israeli bombardment. In Ukraine, more than 15,000 have been killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion began more than four years ago.
Conflicts in the Middle East are a “product of the descent into lawlessness, made possible by a vision of the world in which war-making and the killings of civilians are normalised”, said Callamard.
“No effective steps have been taken against Israel for its repeated, constant violation of basic standards of humanity.”
However, there is some room for optimism, Amnesty said.
It listed moments of “resistance” such as Gen Z-led protests; the growing number of states joining South Africa’s case against Israel’s genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ); the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) crimes against humanity charges against former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte; the Council of Europe’s special tribunal for the crime of aggression against Ukraine; and the ICC’s arrest warrant against two Taliban leaders for “gender-based persecution”.
Oscar winner Sean Baker has found an unexpected way to inspire future generations of independent filmmakers — at the bank.
The auteur has secured the first big payday of his career for his follow-up to best picture winner “Anora,” the sex-worker dramedy that made history in 2025 when the Oscars handed Baker four trophies in one night, tying the record set by Walt Disney.
The project in question is “Ti Amo!” which Baker has described as “an ode to the Italian sex comedies of the ’60s and ’70s.” Warner Bros. announced it had won the film last week at CinemaCon in Las Vegas. It was a major flex for the studio’s new indie-centric label Clockwork, run by Christian Parkes (former marketing chief for Neon).
What they didn’t say onstage at Caesars Palace is that Clockwork bought the distribution rights to “Ti Amo!” for an eye-popping $22 million, five sources familiar with the deal tell Variety. Baked into that number is the film’s budget, which is being financed by FilmNation and is expected to be north of $10 million. The final cost of the film won’t be finalized until Baker completes a script.
However, the surplus will be divided among FilmNation, a few other key production players and Baker, who is poised to earn a multimillion-dollar salary for his work as writer, director, editor and producer of “Ti Amo!”
For Baker, the pact means greater financial security after years of roughing it in service of his art. His brand is scrappy, by-the-skin-of-our-teeth filmmaking with shoestring budgets and, in early days, shooting “Tangerine” on an iPhone. With Clockwork, Baker will have one distributor overseeing release, marketing and strategy (except in France) for the first time in his career.
“Isn’t it great to see a filmmaker like Sean who has earned his way up finally get rewarded so he can keep getting to make movies his way?” said one executive with knowledge of the deal.
Baker shopped the project last year to multiple bidders, including Neon and A24 and Disney’s Searchlight Pictures. One offer, for U.S. rights alone, came in at roughly $5 million, two sources say, while others came closer to Clockwork’s deal for global distribution. Baker is not signed to a major talent agency but had Lichter Grossman lawyer James Feldman to negotiate on his behalf. He is managed by Adam Kersh, an indie veteran whose clients include other auteurs like Ira Sachs and Amy Seimetz.
The project was sold as a pitch, sources add. Cameras are expected to roll in September. Another sign of Baker’s post-Oscar power is that the Clockwork sale was not contingent on cast, nor is he expected to hire an A-lister.
The “Ti Amo!” deal comes as indie filmmaking stars are finding it difficult to get fairly compensated for their work. Many projects leave festivals like Sundance or Cannes without distribution, and even those filmmakers that get deals have seen their residuals and back-end participation shrink as streaming has upended the economics of Hollywood. That’s led some to experiment with alternative ways of getting their passion projects to the screen.
“The Brutalist” director Brady Corbet is putting together his next project — an epic tale about the history of the occult in America — without a studio partner. Similarly, Tom Ford has adapted Anne Rice’s novel “Cry to Heaven” as an independently financed feature starring Adele. The hope in both cases is that the movies will get a bigger sale price after screening at a high-profile festival than they would if distribution rights were sold ahead of filming. That’s a bet Baker isn’t taking with “Ti Amo!,” and given the rich deal he secured, why would he?
As revered as he may be among cinephiles, Baker would normally have to pivot to directing a mid-budget or tentpole film or work for a streamer like Netflix to receive this kind of compensation. The latter is a nonstarter, given that Baker is a passionate defender of cinemas. Baker has long been underpaid in comparison with his reputation and influence in the market.
Most of his projects take three years to produce, and he tends to put any money he makes back into his next films. During the awards season run for 2017’s “The Florida Project,” Baker lived in a small West Hollywood apartment. On Oscar night 2025, he and partner Sammy Kwan went home to walk their dogs in-between the ceremony and the after-party. It’s doubtful that Christopher Nolan or Martin Scorsese did the same.
Mick Betancourt, a veteran writer, producer and showrunner with a long list of credits on crime dramas and action series like the newest seasons of the Alan Ritchson-starrer Reacher, witnessed a violent crime happening in real time on New York City’s Lower East Side as if it were ripped straight from one of his scripts.
Rather than sit idly by to see how it played out from afar, he sprang into action to chase down the suspect who — spoiler alert! — ended up in handcuffs by the time the harrowing incident was over. But not before Betancourt bolted approximately half a mile (or more) as he pursued the suspect over 15 minutes, a scene that had its own ebbs and flows and ended in time for Betancourt to make early dinner reservations with his wife.
“I grew up in a chaotic and violent area and with some violence in my own house and this felt a time when I could do something about it, though I don’t know if any of the Brown or Harvard guys I’ve worked with are chasing guys down like this,” said the native of Chicago, whose resume includes work as a showrunner, writer, executive producer, director and actor. “I also don’t know what the gods have in store for me now so this might’ve been my last hurrah.”
It started late afternoon on Friday, April 10, when Betancourt and his wife were standing near their hotel, Nine Orchard, near Canal Street, and he witnessed a man sprinting past them. “I spotted a bottle of alcohol in the sprinter’s left hand, a short, stocky bottle, like Don Julio. I turned to my wife and said, ‘The shit’s about to hit the fan,’” per details Betancourt laid out in a new Substack post published on Sunday titled “To chase or not to chase, that is the question.”
Moments later, Betancourt, who turned 52 in recent days, spotted a man in his mid-50s, someone he presumed to be the owner of a nearby store where the alleged robbery took place, running after the suspect. He caught up to him and a scuffle ensued, all of which Betancourt witnessed.
“As they wrestled, I looked around and nobody was helping. Nobody jumped in — including me,” Betancourt writes, adding that he pondered the worst possible outcomes were he to get involved. “In a flash, during the standing wrestling match, the robber got a hold of one of the store owner’s legs, lifted it up, effectively whiplashing the owner from a standing position, to slamming his head into the concrete. That THUMP is an unforgettable sound. The whole block, which had been watching, gasped, said ‘Oh fuck’ or screamed. The shop owner’s body went limp, his eyes rolled into the back of his head and his arms flopped out to his sides like he was crucified.”
Betancourt assumed the store owner was dead based on body language. He made a split-second decision to take action. “I didn’t want to go back to the scene and see them pulling a sheet over the guy or running caution tape around him and think I could’ve done something in that moment,” he said. So when the suspect took off running, Betancourt “gave chase” by kicking it into high gear.
He laid out the extensive and tense scene in detail, and he sprinted after the man across several New York City blocks. “God cursed me with little alligator legs, but in a cruel twist of fate and irony, he made those hairy little fuckers fast as lightning,” wrote Betancourt.
Mick Betancourt
Courtesy of Subject
At one point, he caught up to him and screamed, “Get on the ground now!” The serious direction gave the man pause and he did slow down long enough for the men to exchange words. The suspect also seemed sure that the man was fatally injured, as he told Betancourt that his actions were in self-defense. Betancourt, who is sober and in recovery for more than two decades, tried to reason with the man as he believed he might be in the throes of addiction.
Their exchange was brief as the man wouldn’t give up and he got away again. But Betancourt wouldn’t give up. He sprinted after him again, and when he lost his whereabouts momentarily, he sought the help of two elderly women who weren’t overly helpful in pointing out the right direction. In a twist of fate, Betancourt then ran past Housing Authority police officers who assisted in the effort and eventually called for backup from the New York Police Department.
Betancourt recalled that four NYPD cars arrived on scene, one carrying the store owner, who was alive, alert and came to identify the alleged thief while pressing a bag of ice on his head. “I couldn’t believe it. I really thought he was dead,” wrote Betancourt, who was able to then give an official statement and eventually reunite with his wife, who was still outside the hotel. “When I got back to the hotel, a woman who worked there, who saw the whole thing begin, called me a hero. No, I thought, I was a coward who decided to do something about it.”
The Hollywood Reporter verified the incident with the NYPD. A spokesperson in the office of the deputy commissioner for public Information confirmed that 35-year-old Iysa Muhammad was arrested and charged with third-degree robbery and second-degree assault after allegedly stealing two bottles of liquor from a store on Grand Street. The 37-year-old man, who was injured in the alleged assault, was transported to NYC Health and Hospitals/Bellevue in stable condition. The investigation is ongoing.
As for Betancourt, his legs were gassed and it took a few hours to decompress, but he’s now back home and back at work on the upcoming season five of Reacher as a writer and executive producer. He worked on season four, which is expected to debut sometime in 2026. He also worked on the Amazon Prime Video spin-off series, Neagley, focused on Frances Neagley, played by Maria Sten. Betancourt’s other credits include The Purge, Shots Fired, Wicked City, Chicago P.D., Chicago Fire, Ironside, Necessary Roughness, The Mob Doctor, Detroit 1-8-7 and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
When he’s back on set, he’ll have something to talk to Ritchson about after the in-demand star recently had his own wild real-life encounter near his Tennessee home that also looked like it could’ve been ripped from one of his episodes.
“Michael” director Antoine Fuqua opened up for the first time about the movie’s dramatic reshoots in a new interview with The New Yorker. As Variety reported ahead of the biopic’s theatrical release, “Michael” was forced to spend up to $15 million on additional photography in order to overhaul the film’s structure.
The original movie started in 1993 with police raiding Michael Jackson‘s Neverland Ranch after he’s accused of sexually abusing 13-year-old Jordan Chandler. The film then flashed back to recount the superstar’s life story and build back up to the allegation and the Chandler family’s lawsuit, which Jackson ultimately settled for $23 million before the investigation was closed when the Chandler family stopped cooperating with prosecutors.
Nothing involving Jordan Chandler or his family’s allegations remain in the final movie. These scenes had to be removed after attorneys for the Jackson estate realized there was a clause in the settlement that blocked the depiction or mention of Chandler in any movie. Gone was the original opening depicting the police raid on Neverland Ranch, which Fuqua teased to The New Yorker by saying: “I shot [Michael] being stripped naked, treated like an animal, a monster.”
Per The New Yorker: “Fuqua is not convinced that Jackson did what he is accused of doing, despite the number of accusers (five) and the fact that Jackson publicly talked about sharing his bed with boys.”
Jackson faced 10 charges in 2005 related to the alleged abuse of another 13-year-old but was later acquitted on all counts. The 2019 documentary “Leaving Neverland” then chronicled new allegations from two more of Jackson’s alleged victims.
“When I hear things about us — Black people in particular, especially in a certain position — there’s always pause,” Fuqua said, with The New Yorker noting the filmmaker “was skeptical of some of the accusers’ parents, particularly Chandler’s father, who was recorded threatening to insure that Jackson was ‘humiliated beyond belief.’”
While Fuqua stressed he didn’t know the truth behind the allegations made against Jackson over the years, he noted that “sometimes people do some nasty things for some money.”
Fuqua and his “Michael” cast and crew assembled last June to overhaul the movie over 22 days of reshoots, as Variety reported. Sources said the Jackson estate shouldered the bill of up to $15 million because its error necessitated the changes. The new version of “Michael” ends with the icon at the height of his career and centers the family tension between Jackson and his domineering father Joe as the dramatic through line of the story.
“Michael” opens in theaters April 24 from Lionsgate.
After debuting in the US, Gemini in Chrome is making its way to more markets. Starting today, Google is rolling out Chrome’s built-in chatbot to users in Asia and the Pacific, including Australia, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and Vietnam. The expansion comes after Google earlier this year made Gemini in Chrome available to people in Canada, India and New Zealand.
With the exception of Japan, where Google isn’t making the new suite available on iOS just yet, everyone else in the countries mentioned above can access Gemini in Chrome through Chrome’s desktop browser, and the app on their iPhone or iPad. To get started, just tap the “Ask Gemini” icon at the top right of the screen. It will open a new sidebar Google introduced at the start of the year where you can chat with Gemini across every open tab. From there, you can also access Google’s in-house image generator, Nano Banana 2. As you would expect, the suite offers integrations with Google’s other apps, allowing you, for instance, to add events to Calendar without leaving the interface.
If you don’t want to use Gemini, you can right click on the shortcut to unpin it from the top of the interface.
Update 7:43PM ET: This article has been updated to reflect the expansion includes the entire Asia-Pacific region.
Amazon and Anthropic are strengthening their ties once again, with steep financial commitments made on both sides. Today, Amazon announced that it will invest $5 billion in the AI company, along with as much as $20 billion in additional payments if certain milestones are met. This news follows the initial $4 billion investment Amazon made in Anthropic in 2023 and a second $4 billion round from 2024.
On Anthropic’s side, it has committed to continued use of Amazon’s custom Trainium silicon for its AI models. The latest agreement will see Anthropic promising to spend more than $100 billion on AWS technologies over the coming decade. It will secure up to 5 gigawatts of current and future chip capacity for training and powering its models. Their partnership is also bringing Anthropic’s Claude platform to Amazon Web Services customers within the AWS portal, removing the need for additional credentials.
If you are a bank, your core business model is quite elegant. You take people’s money, you pay them zero percent interest on their checking accounts, and you lend that money out to other people at five or seven percent interest. You keep the difference. This is a very good business, and if you have it, you will fight very hard to keep it.
The problem with paying your depositors zero percent is that eventually, someone else will come along and offer to pay them something. When this happens, you have two choices. You can raise your own deposit rates to compete, which costs you money and ruins your business model. Or you can go to the government and ask them to make it illegal for the others to pay interest.
Historically, banks strongly prefer the second option.
A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar. If you give a stablecoin issuer a dollar, they give you a digital token, put your dollar in Treasury bills, and earn about 4%. Historically, stablecoin issuers have kept that yield for themselves. The obvious next step in the evolution of this product is that they share some of the yield with you, so that you will hold their token instead of leaving your money parked elsewhere.
Under $GENIUS, issuers themselves cannot pay yield to holders. The live CLARITY fight is whether affiliated exchanges, distributors, or rewards programs can share those economics with users in ways that are functionally equivalent to interest.
The banks do not care for this.
And so they are calling their senators. Congress has been locked in talks for months over a crypto regulatory framework — the $GENIUS Act last summer for stablecoin issuers, and now the CLARITY Act for everything else, including the question of what stablecoin players can do. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has publicly urged the Senate to move forward:
“Bogus butter” was the term used for oleomargarine.
Bettmann Archive
But the traditional banking lobby has demands first. According to Crypto In America reporter Eleanor Terrett, the North Carolina Bankers Association has been circulating a message, encouraging member banks to call lawmakers with this script:
“The CLARITY Act must include an airtight prohibition on payments for stablecoins acting as a store of value by clearly barring any interest or yield-like payments tied to the holding, retention, or balance of payment stablecoins — without carve-outs that can be met through nominal activity or loyalty programs.”
This is a masterpiece of the genre. What the banks are saying, in plain English, is: “We cannot stop stablecoins from existing, but you must legally mandate that they be worse than our products.” They want to ban anything “economically or functionally equivalent” to interest. We are the banks, we own the concept of interest, so you must stop the computer program.
It is also, as it turns out, a margarine law.
In 1869, a French chemist named Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès figured out how to make a cheap spreadable fat from beef tallow. Napoleon III wanted something to feed the army and the poor, and Mège-Mouriès gave him margarine. By the mid-1870s it had arrived in the United States, where it cost significantly less than butter and tasted, to an unaided palate, basically the same. This is the point at which the American dairy industry discovered that it could not compete on price or efficiency with a man who had invented butter in a factory, and so, like all industries that cannot compete on price or efficiency, it turned to the regulators.
By the turn of the century, more than thirty states had passed anti-margarine laws. The pitch was consumer protection: people could not be allowed to accidentally buy margarine while thinking it was butter.
Wisconsin farmers protest the usage and sale of ‘synthetic butter,’ otherwise known as oleo margarine which was made from vegetable or coconut oils, Madison, Wisconsin, circa 1930. (Photo by Underwood Archives/Getty Images)
Getty Images
The mechanism was, in retrospect, spectacular. New Hampshire and Vermont, among others, required margarine to be dyed pink. Not labeled pink. Dyed. The theory was that nobody will spread pink grease on bread, and therefore the product will be technically legal but commercially dead. This is an airtight prohibition without carve-outs that can be met through nominal activity. The Supreme Court struck down New Hampshire’s pink-margarine law in 1898, holding that it was “in necessary effect, prohibitory.”
So the states pivoted. They said: fine, you can sell margarine, but you cannot sell it yellow. Margarine is naturally white. Butter is yellow because cows eat grass. Without the color, the consumer will look at this tub of white grease and reject it. Commercially dead, but this time constitutional. The federal Margarine Act of 1886 added a two-cent-per-pound tax. The Grout Bill of 1902 raised it to ten cents per pound on yellow margarine while leaving uncolored margarine at a quarter of a cent.
Read the Grout Bill carefully. It does tax margarine — but it taxes margarine that resembles butter forty times more heavily. The regulated quantity is not just the product; it is the product’s resemblance to the incumbent product. Substitute “yellow” for “economically or functionally equivalent” and you are reading the March draft of the CLARITY Act.
The margarine industry did what industries do when regulators ban yellow. It shipped the product as a block of white margarine with a separate capsule of yellow dye. The consumer put the block in a bowl at home and worked the dye through with a wooden spoon. Generations of Americans spent the first half of the twentieth century sitting at their kitchen tables, performing a small act of civil disobedience every week to save thirty cents on butter. By the mid-1940s, Leo Peters had patented a plastic pouch with the dye capsule sealed inside, so consumers could pinch and knead the bag instead of mixing margarine in a bowl. This was considered a major innovation. If you are over a certain age, someone in your family may remember this.
Wisconsin kept its yellow-margarine restrictions until 1967, the last state to give up. Minnesota required public disclosure when oleomargarine was served in place of butter. Violations could carry criminal penalties. The point was not subtle: margarine could exist, but the law made restaurants announce the substitution.
Nobody was fooled. Everyone understood the point. The workaround became the product.
Eventually, World War II hit. Butter was heavily rationed, margarine was less so, and American households got so used to mixing the dye that they became much more comfortable substituting margarine for butter. Margarine outsold butter by 1958. The dairy lobby had spent eighty years successfully defending the legal definition of the word “butter,” and in the process had taught an entire country that you could mix your own yellow dye into a cheaper, longer-lasting, identically-functional spread and it would be fine. The carve-out became the industry. By the time Wisconsin gave up in 1967, margarine was not the substitute. It was the mass-market spread, and butter had become the luxury good.
In a strange coda, butter later won a different fight. By the 2000s, margarine’s trans-fat reputation had collapsed, and butter brands increasingly competed on provenance, fat content, and flavor — Irish grass-fed butter, European-style butterfat, cultured butter. The industry that had spent eighty years legislating against its substitute eventually won a different fight, the one no regulator had forced on it, which was to pay attention to what customers actually wanted.
This is the part where you may be nodding and assume the same thing will happen with stablecoins. Which it probably will. But there is a more recent and more financially precise version of this story, and it is even less flattering to the bank lobby, because the bank lobby is the one it happened to.
In 1933, the Banking Act prohibited banks from paying interest on demand deposits and gave the Fed authority to cap rates on savings deposits. This was Regulation Q. It was meant to prevent destructive rate competition and protect the community bank deposit franchise. It was airtight. It had no carve-outs. It was the closest financial ancestor of the regime the NCBA is currently asking Senator Tillis to enact for stablecoins.
In 1971, Bruce Bent and Henry Brown started the first money market mutual fund. It held short-term Treasuries and commercial paper. It passed the yield through to shareholders as “dividends,” because technically it was a 1940 Act registered fund and not a bank. It was functionally a checking account paying market rates, but formally it was a security, and Regulation Q regulated banks, not securities. In 1977 Merrill Lynch added check-writing and a Visa card and called it the Cash Management Account. By the early 1980s, money-market funds had become a $200-billion-plus industry. Today they hold more than $7.6 trillion. Deposit-rate ceilings were dismantled through the 1980s; the demand-deposit interest ban finally disappeared in 2011, seventy-eight years after the original prohibition.
The thing the banks wanted to protect in 1933 — their exclusive franchise over yield-bearing, dollar-denominated, liquid instruments — they lost to a wrapper that was technically not a bank. They did not lose it because of bad regulation. They lost it because the airtight prohibition trained an entire adjacent industry to build the same product in a form the prohibition did not cover.
So. Back to the NCBA sentence.
“Airtight prohibition” is a thing you can ask for. You will sometimes get it. The Oleomargarine Act of 1886 is an airtight prohibition. Regulation Q is an airtight prohibition.
What airtight prohibitions are very bad at is remaining about the thing they were written about. The margarine laws were about butter, until they were about teaching consumers that butter was optional. Regulation Q was about bank deposits, until it was about making money market funds a better savings vehicle for the American middle class. The prohibition works on the dimension the incumbent specified. The industry routes around that dimension. The resulting product is a version of the substitute specifically adapted to the contours of the prohibition. Which tends to make it better.
President Donald Trump signs the $GENIUS Act, a bill that regulates stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency, in the East Room of the White House, Friday, July 18, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
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The CLARITY Act fight is about whether a crypto exchange can pay yield on a stablecoin balance. The banks want airtight. They want no carve-outs met through nominal activity. They want no exceptions for novel loyalty programs or business models. They want an economic equivalence standard strong enough to catch any structure that has the effect of interest, even if it is formally something else. This is, one should grant, a coherent request. It is what a lawyer who understood everything about how margarine beat butter, and everything about how money market funds beat banks, would ask for. It is the prohibition you would draft if you had read the history.
And the reason it will not work is that the airtight prohibition is often the cause of the substitution. It is not the defense against it. The dairy industry did not lose to margarine despite the yellow-dye laws. It lost to margarine because of them. The laws created a product category — mix-your-own margarine — that consumers engaged with at their kitchen tables for fifty years. Regulation Q did not fail to protect banks from money market funds. Regulation Q was the reason money market funds existed in that form.
If the CLARITY Act passes with an airtight prohibition on anything economically equivalent to interest, the stablecoin industry will spend the next decade designing products that are formally something else. They will hand users a white stablecoin and a digital packet of yellow dye and let them mix the yield in at home — which is to say, they will build products specifically adapted to the contours of whatever the government agencies will jointly write in their rulemaking. And at the end of the decade, the bank deposit franchise will discover it has been competing not with stablecoin yield, which is easy to regulate, but with whatever the industry built instead.
A customer enters a Blockbuster store in Dallas, Texas, U.S., on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2013. Blockbuster announced at the beginning of November that it would be closing all stores as well as ending domestic retail and DVD by mail services. Photographer: Mike Fuentes/Bloomberg
The deeper problem for the banks is that yield is not a side feature they’re defending. Their profit depends on paying depositors zero and earning five, and stablecoins-that-share-yield is specifically the product that breaks that model. This is Blockbuster and Netflix. In 2000, Blockbuster collected $800 million in late fees, which was sixteen percent of its revenue. The company was profitable because it was annoying. The famous story is that Reed Hastings started Netflix because Blockbuster charged him $40 for returning Apollo 13 late; Marc Randolph, his co-founder, has since admitted they made that up because it was the easiest way to explain the subscription model to the press. Which is fine. The story worked because everyone instantly understood what Netflix was selling. They were selling not-Blockbuster. That same year, Blockbuster had the chance to buy Netflix for $50 million and laughed them out of the room. In 2005, it tried to scrap late fees to compete. It could not figure out how to make money without them. It brought them back under a different name and filed for bankruptcy in 2010. The airtight prohibition is the version of that story where Blockbuster gets Congress to ban flat-rate subscriptions. Which is, in effect, what the banks are asking for.
NEW YORK – MARCH 17: People stand inside the offices of JP Morgan Chase on March 17, 2008 in New York City. (Photo by Michael Nagle/Getty Images)
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Not every bank is Blockbuster. The smart response to better rails is to use the better rails. JPMorgan has done exactly that: its deposit token JPMD — which can pay interest because it is a bank deposit rather than a stablecoin — launched on a public blockchain last year. Multiple banks are running similar tokenized-deposit products on their own private blockchains, which is a permutation of the same bet. The largest banks are not sitting this one out. They are building the product the NCBA wants Congress to ban. Which suggests the lobbying is less a strategy than a delay tactic — one that won’t save the banks running it, because the loudest banks in the lobbying fight may not be the banks best positioned to compete.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers published a paper two weeks ago arguing that a complete ban on stablecoin yield would increase aggregate bank lending by $2.1 billion — 0.02 percent of total loans. The American Bankers Association rebutted this by saying the CEA had studied the wrong question. On this one narrow point, the ABA is right. The CEA studied the current-scale lending effect of a prohibition. The relevant question is what happens in year twenty. The relevant comparison is not money market funds in 1972. It is money market funds in 2011.
The banks are welcome to get the airtight prohibition they are asking for. They should probably be careful what they ask for. The last time they asked for one, they got Vanguard. The time before that, somebody got Wisconsin.
