Robert Thomson. Picture: News UK
News Corp CEO Robert Thomson has warned AI companies scraping the publisher’s websites without paying that “if you’re stealing our stuff we are going to sue you”.
Meta will pay News Corp up to $50m per year for at least three years under a new licensing deal that will see the Facebook owner allowed to use the publisher’s news and archive content from the US and UK in its AI products.
News Corp’s deal with OpenAI announced in May 2024 was worth a similar amount: more than $250m over five years.
News Corp is currently suing Perplexity and, as the owner of book publisher Harper Collins, was involved in a class action piracy lawsuit by authors against Anthropic that has resulted in a $1.5bn settlement.
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Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco on Monday, Thomson said News Corp (which owns The Times, The Sun, The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Australian and many more titles) has a “woo and a sue strategy”.
He explained: “We’ll woo you, we’d like you to be our partner, but if you’re stealing our stuff we are going to sue you. And if you look at a lot of the bots coming in and scraping our stuff and they’re using our material in new AI verticals, we’re coming for you. We can see you doing it. We’ll get round to you eventually. There will be a discount for those who hand themselves in and there’ll be a penalty for those who resist…
“The fact that people either legitimately or illicitly are already using our content tells us that there is an emerging market that is not yet fully appreciated.”
Thomson said the major AI companies – citing Anthropic, Perplexity and OpenAI – “will need to partner with us in one form or the other”.
He said a “core ask” in the OpenAI deal was that “we didn’t want to create a cannibalisation engine… In a way you want OpenAI to have the opportunity to highlight your content, create links, which OpenAI does, and therefore have the confidence that your content is better than somebody else’s content.”
Last month OpenAI started testing adverts on ChatGPT in the US. Thomson said News Corp is “planning to take advantage of the ad opportunities” and will be “a proud launch partner” of that providing feedback on what they think does and does not work.
News Corp ‘essentially an input company’
Thomson said News Corp’s content is “valuable” as an input to AI tools like ChatGPT.
“We’re essentially an input company and the great threat in the age of AI is going to be to what you might call output companies. We’re an input in the way that semiconductors are an input, in the way data centres are an input, in the way that energy is an input and so you look at breaking news, you look at unique real estate information, listings – yes, they’re public, but it’s what you do with those listings. You look at books. There’s so many elements of the company that increasingly are being recognised as valuable as an input.”
Thomson added that AI companies are “coming to us because the data and the information and the news that they input has to be reliable and it’s hard to beat The Times of London or The Australian or Dow Jones obviously as an input. And it might be agricultural information. We own The Weekly Times in Australia, the best known agricultural masthead…
“So I think you’ll actually see a dramatic change in the appreciation of the value of our assets over time simply because more and more people will be coming to us in the financial sector, in energy, in rural services, in general news…”
‘If you want to pay money to be out of date, feel free’
News companies also have an advantage because they are constantly creating fresh information, he continued.
“AI is essentially retrospective. It’s based on pre-existing patterns. If you want to be contemporary, you have to have immediacy. As we are a company that’s minute after minute, hour after hour creating fresh immediacy, we have something that these companies not only want, but need.”
Thomson added that News Corp’s content is “refreshed, immediately instantaneously in a way non-news organisations can’t. The minute something happens and you’re getting some generic general reply to something from your AI engine you’re out of date.
“If you want to pay money to be out of date, feel free. If you want to pay money to be properly, immediately briefed about important developments in the world, you are going to have to come to us.”
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