Speaking during the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said artificial intelligence is “only as useful, only as trustworthy, as the quality and integrity of its inputs.” Without professionally produced journalism and other creative work, he argued, AI systems risk leaving users with a “slimy sea” of low-quality output, as reported by TheWrap.
News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and publisher HarperCollins, is pursuing two tracks at once. It has licensing deals with OpenAI and Meta and says it is in “advanced discussions with several other honorable companies.” At the same time, it is suing companies it accuses of using its content without permission, including a countersuit against Brave over alleged scraping of WSJ and New York Post articles.
Thomson also named names. He said Perplexity remains a target of News Corp’s legal action and took aim at Brave, calling it “a company brave in name only.” He accused the company of using masked web crawlers to collect copyrighted articles and repackage them for business customers.
“Companies who buy from these pirates should know that they are in possession of stolen goods,” Thomson said.
But his broader warning was about who could face legal action next. News Corp, he said, is looking beyond the AI companies scraping and using its content to the businesses buying their products.
“We’re focusing not just on companies that have scraped and stolen our content, but on their clients who, knowingly or unknowingly, have purchased stolen goods,” Thomson said. “As for litigation, it’s far from over.”
Thomson also pushed back against the idea that licensing deals are a bad trade for publishers as AI search cuts into referral traffic, saying that the agreements with Meta and OpenAI are not “merely transactional.”
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“We are creators; they are savvy distributors,” Thomson said. “Our inputs are crucial components of their outputs.”
Thomson confirmed that the Meta deal, reportedly worth $50 million a year, is already contributing to News Corp’s business. He said future agreements could include broad deals with major platforms as well as narrower licensing arrangements tailored to specific industries.
For other publishers, News Corp’s approach suggests that licensing and litigation are not really separate strategies. The company is using lawsuits to pressure AI companies to pay for access to its journalism, while licensing deals show what that access can be worth.
If News Corp expands its lawsuits to businesses that buy AI products, rather than limiting them to companies accused of scraping its content, more companies could face legal risk for using AI tools built on unlicensed journalism.
“There are more deals to come,” Thomson said in his final remark. “And hopefully not too much litigation.”
