Comedian Jon Stewart tore into his former employer on The Daily Show Monday evening, suggesting that he severed his professional relationship with Apple over instances in which they instructed him to avoid certain subjects.

As Apple newly faces a broad-ranging antitrust lawsuit brought by the Justice Department and 16 states, Jon Stewart took to the airwaves of Comedy Central for his now weekly hosting gig on The Daily Show to talk about the tech giant — for whom he produced the Apple TV+ show The Problem With Jon Stewart from 2021 to 2023.

We heard last fall, when Stewart ended his show at Apple, that he was parting ways with the company over "creative differences," and some sources told the New York Times that these differences largely had to do with Stewart's intention to cover topics including artificial intelligence and China that the suits at Apple weren't pleased about.

But there may have been even more to it.

Monday's show began with a takedown, of sorts, about AI, and the ways in which big tech companies like Alphabet and Meta have been overselling the potential positives about AI, while so far under-delivering when it comes to what it can give us now. And there's the uncomfortable conversation about how AI can potentially impact people's jobs — with one entrepreneur, Mustafa Suleyman, shown on CNBC saying "these are fundamentally labor-replacing tools."

This was exactly the type of segment he wanted to do on the Apple TV+ show but couldn't. And to drive that point home, he invited as his guest on Monday's show a guest that Apple had forbidden him from having on his previous show, Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan.

"They literally said 'please don’t talk to her,'" Stewart said at the start of his interview with Khan Monday. He then joked, "Having nothing to do with what you do for a living, I don’t think they cared for you."

Stewart added that Apple didn't want him talking about AI, just like they didn't want him talking to the FTC, and clearly this is because they had corporate interests to protect — despite telling him he had complete creative control of the show.

"What is that sensitivity? Why are they so afraid to have these conversations out in the public sphere,” Stewart asked Khan.

"I think it just shows the dangers of what happens when you concentrate so much power and so much decision making in a small number of companies," Khan said.

Stewart had already poked the bear in his first two seasons of The Problem With Jon Stewart, and it seems like, with an election year ahead, both parties saw the writing on the wall that the relationship wasn't working. As the Times noted in October, "Delving into current events, as Mr. Stewart did on 'The Problem,' could have put Apple at the center of the kinds of political and geopolitical controversies that other major corporations have confronted, including the way conservatives turned on Disney or liberals protested Starbucks over gun safety concerns."

And, even if the FTC isn't involved with the current litigation against Apple, there are plenty of ways in which Big Tech is walking on eggshells around government regulators. The companies hardly want to call attention to any further need for regulation if they don't have to.

In his first few weeks back at the anchor desk at The Daily Show, Stewart hasn't shied away from talking about the war in Gaza, or other sensitive subjects that corporations like Apple want to remain neutral on when possible.

The Times also noted that timely talk shows, like the kind Stewart has always helmed, haven't always played well on streaming anyway — given that streaming episodes need to have more of a shelflife than a week or two. Late night is probably the best place for Stewart to be at this point anyhow.

Previously: Jon Stewart Is Leaving His AppleTV+ Show, May Be Butting Heads With Apple Over China Coverage