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.”

“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.”

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A Manhattan federal judge on Friday refused to dismiss the core of Reddit’s lawsuit against Perplexity AI, allowing the platform to pursue claims that the AI search startup illegally bypassed technical protections to scrape Reddit content without paying for a license.

The ruling doesn’t determine whether Perplexity broke the law. But it does keep alive a legal theory that could prove as important as copyright in the battle over AI training data: that circumventing a platform’s access controls can itself create liability.

U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer ruled that Reddit can continue pursuing claims that Perplexity and three data scraping companies unlawfully bypassed protections designed to limit automated access to Reddit content, according to Reuters. He also found that Reddit has standing to sue over the alleged misuse of posts created by its users.

The defendants include Lithuania-based Oxylabs, Russia-based AWMProxy and Texas-based SerpApi. Reddit alleges the companies extracted its content from billions of search results without permission and that Perplexity worked with at least one of them to obtain the data. Perplexity, which does not license Reddit’s content, denies the allegations.

While Engelmayer dismissed several secondary claims, he allowed Reddit’s central allegations—including conspiracy and unlawful circumvention—to move forward.

Perplexity argues Reddit is attempting to control access to publicly available webpages it doesn’t own, using security measures it didn’t create and on behalf of users who never authorized the lawsuit. The company says it will continue defending what it calls the open internet.

Reddit argues the issue isn’t whether its content is publicly visible but whether companies deliberately bypassed technical barriers to collect it at scale without permission or compensation.

SerpApi attorney Jeff Homrig echoed that view, arguing the company accesses public search results rather than Reddit itself and that publicly available information doesn’t become proprietary simply because a platform later decides to charge for access.

That distinction could have broad consequences across the AI industry.

Reddit has transformed its user-generated content into a licensing business, striking deals with Google and OpenAI while describing itself in court filings as the most frequently cited source in AI-generated answers. If companies can obtain the same data by scraping around access controls, the value of those licensing agreements is diminished.

The lawsuit is one of a growing number testing how AI companies acquire training data. Authors, record labels, news publishers and other content owners have all sued AI developers over the use of copyrighted material. Reddit is also pursuing a separate lawsuit against Anthropic in California state court over similar scraping allegations.

For publishers, platforms and AI companies, Friday’s ruling is significant because it points beyond copyright. A favorable ruling on Reddit’s circumvention claims could give content owners another legal lever to protect their data—and strengthen their hand in negotiating AI licensing agreements.

The case is still in its early stages. But by allowing the core scraping and circumvention claims to proceed, the Southern District of New York has signaled that the next major battleground over AI training data may not be copyright alone. It may be whether AI companies can legally get around the digital gates content owners have built.

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ChatGPT has begun refusing requests to write in the style of named authors, marking a notable change in how OpenAI’s chatbot handles imitation prompts. As reported by Ars Technica, the system now steers users toward describing literary traits rather than directly invoking a writer’s style.

The Media Copilot was able to replicate the result on July 28. After asking ChatGPT to write a short story in the voice of Ernest Hemingway, the chatbot replied, “I can’t write in the exact style of a specific author or closely imitate a copyrighted work’s voice. I can, however, write an original passage that draws on some broad characteristics often associated with Ernest Hemingway—plain language, understated emotion, concrete observation, and spare dialogue—without closely imitating his distinctive expression.”

The change is less about the output than the prompt. Requests that explicitly name an author may now be refused, but prompts describing the same stylistic traits—such as minimalist prose, clipped dialogue or a gothic mood—can still generate comparable writing without invoking a specific writer.

The apparent shift comes as OpenAI continues to face multiple copyright lawsuits over its AI models and outputs. While those cases primarily concern training data rather than stylistic imitation, they have intensified scrutiny over how AI systems reproduce or emulate copyrighted creative works, prompting companies to adopt more cautious safeguards around requests that closely mimic identifiable authors.

Other chatbot makers have drawn the line differently. Ars Technica cites a No Latency study that found Google’s Gemini complied consistently with author-imitation requests, while Perplexity refused and redirected them. Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft Copilot fell between those positions, complying while adding qualifications. The uneven treatment means a refusal in one product does not prevent a writer or editor from trying the same prompt elsewhere.

For newsrooms and publishers, ChatGPT’s new author-style restrictions underscore the need for AI policies that govern editorial practices rather than any single technology provider. Internal guidelines should define whether staff may request imitation of living authors, deceased writers, competing publications or an organization’s own house style, while requiring disclosure and human review before AI-generated text is incorporated into published work.

OpenAI has not, based on the material cited here, announced a formal written-text policy that matches the chatbot’s current behavior. Until it does, publishers should expect the boundary to be defined largely by the product itself: prompts that explicitly name authors may be declined, while requests describing the same stylistic qualities in broader terms can still generate a response.

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The Delhi High Court handed OpenAI a major legal victory Friday, ruling that the company’s use of news agency ANI’s articles to train ChatGPT does not infringe copyright because it qualifies as fair reporting for research purposes under India’s Copyright Act, Reuters reported.

It is the first substantive court finding in India on whether AI companies can train large language models on copyrighted news content without a license. That question is still open in courtrooms in the United States and Canada, where OpenAI faces similar suits.

ANI first sued OpenAI in November 2024, alleging the company trained ChatGPT on its copyrighted news reports without permission and that the chatbot falsely attributed fabricated stories to the agency. Presiding over the ANI v. OpenAI lawsuit, Delhi High Court Justice Amit Bansal rejected the copyright claim, finding that ANI failed to prove ChatGPT had memorized or reproduced its articles in response to users.

The judge also rejected ANI’s claim over OpenAI’s storage of its articles, ruling that retaining the content for AI training is protected as research under India’s Copyright Act of 1957 and does not infringe the agency’s copyright.

The ruling contrasts with ongoing litigation in the United States, where The New York Times, the Center for Investigative Reporting and a growing number of publishers argue that OpenAI’s use of copyrighted material for AI training violates U.S. copyright law. Unlike India’s fair-dealing framework, which lists specific permitted uses, U.S. courts evaluate fair use case by case. In Canada, a coalition of Canadian news organizations, including CBC and The Globe and Mail, is testing a separate copyright framework in its own lawsuit against OpenAI.

The decision could reshape negotiations between AI developers and publishers in India, where the threat of copyright litigation may carry less weight after the ruling, It could reduce pressure on OpenAI and other AI companies to pursue licensing agreements with Indian news organizations, even as similar disputes continue elsewhere.

The ruling is not the final word in the case. It addresses ANI’s claims at this stage of the proceedings, and appeals remain possible. The judge’s finding on reproduction was also based on the evidence presented by ANI, not a broader conclusion that AI systems can reproduce copyrighted material.

Even so, India has become the first major jurisdiction to find that training AI models on copyrighted news content can qualify as protected research. As courts in the United States and Canada continue to weigh similar claims under different copyright laws, the divergence in legal approaches is becoming increasingly difficult for AI companies and publishers to ignore.

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News Corp has fired back at Brave Software, filing a countersuit that accuses the search company of “flagrant theft” for distributing and selling copies of Wall Street Journal and New York Post articles to AI companies. The Tuesday filing in an Oakland, California, federal court escalates a legal fight Brave started more than a year ago, as reported by Reuters.

Brave sued News Corp preemptively in March 2025, asking a court to declare that bundling copyrighted articles for licensing and resale is not copyright infringement. It filed after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from the Rupert Murdoch-controlled publisher. Brave revised its complaint in May 2026, following what News Corp described as failed negotiations for a market-based licensing deal.

Now News Corp is on offense. In its filing, the company argued that Brave’s “covert scraping” and resale of copyrighted articles fall “nowhere near the bounds” of fair use.

“The more content Brave copies and sells, the more revenue it generates, and the less incentive AI companies have to negotiate licenses with the publishers who produced the content,” the lawsuit said. “Brave profits while publishers are cut out.”

News Corp wants an injunction, unspecified monetary damages and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement. CEO Robert Thomson framed the case bluntly, saying Brave’s conduct showed “blatant disregard” for how information gets disseminated.

“This era of tacky tech trafficking must come to an end if journalism is to have a sustainable future,” he said.

Brave sees itself as the underdog. It has described itself as the smallest of three U.S. companies running independent search engines at scale, behind Google and Microsoft’s Bing. In its own filings, Brave argued that indexing News Corp content to make it searchable, and serving users snippets and “high-level summaries,” qualifies as fair use. It also accused News Corp of threatening to disrupt generative AI, which it called what many consider “the most important innovation so far this century.”

The dispute is one piece of growing litigation over copyrighted content and AI training. The New York Times’ ongoing case against OpenAI and Microsoft remains the highest-profile example, and courts have yet to settle what fair use means when publisher content feeds AI systems. The New York Post, Dow Jones and News Corp’s British and Australian operations are all defendants in Brave’s suit.

For publishers, the fight matters beyond News Corp’s balance sheet. Brave’s business model depends on packaging searchable web content into a data feed that AI developers can buy. If that survives a fair-use challenge, it undercuts the licensing deals publishers have been signing with AI firms. If it doesn’t, intermediaries selling scraped content face steep liability.

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The New York Times and a group of other publishers are asking a federal court to sanction OpenAI, accusing the company of withholding or destroying evidence in a high-stakes copyright case over how ChatGPT was trained and used.

In a motion filed Thursday in federal court in Manhattan, the publishers alleged that OpenAI misrepresented its ability to search training datasets and ChatGPT output logs for copyrighted news material. According to Reuters, the publishers said OpenAI told the court it could not search its large language models for their work while allegedly concealing that it had already done so “even before the first News Plaintiff filed suit.”

The motion is the latest escalation in the copyright fight between major news organizations and AI companies. It also moves the dispute deeper into discovery, where the question is not just whether AI companies can use journalism to train models, but whether they can preserve, search and produce the records needed to prove what happened.

The plaintiffs include The Times, the New York Daily News and other media organizations, including Ziff Davis and the Center for Investigative Reporting, according to The Associated Press and Variety. The original New York Times article reported that the publishers are seeking legal sanctions against OpenAI, including monetary penalties and other remedies.

The filing does not ask for sanctions against Microsoft, which is also a defendant in The Times’ broader copyright case, according to The Times’ summary of the motion. Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI and integrated OpenAI technology into products including Copilot.

“The evidence is in OpenAI’s training data sets and ChatGPT output logs,” the publishers said in the motion, according to The Times. “But instead of just producing that evidence at the start of the case and focusing on the merits of its fair use defense, OpenAI chose obstruction.”

OpenAI rejected the allegations. “As the Times’ case weakens and they’ve been forced to drop claims against us, they’re persisting with their efforts to invade the privacy of people who have nothing to do with this case, including by making these blatantly false allegations,” OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri told Reuters. “We’ll continue defending our users’ privacy and the long-established principles of fair use.”

The publishers allege that OpenAI deleted billions of relevant ChatGPT conversations or made them unsearchable. They also argue that an OpenAI employee later testified that the company had performed multiple searches for news publishers’ content, contradicting earlier representations about the company’s technical limitations.

A sanctions memorandum posted by Ars Technica says the publishers want the court to bar OpenAI from relying on a disputed 20 million-log ChatGPT sample, find that ChatGPT’s output logs include or would have shown substantial use of the publishers’ copyrighted material, instruct the jury on those findings and award fees and costs tied to the discovery fight.

Those remedies would matter because discovery disputes can shape the trial record. If the court finds OpenAI failed to preserve or produce relevant evidence, the ruling could affect what arguments OpenAI can make later and what conclusions a jury may be allowed to draw from missing or incomplete records.

The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, alleging that millions of Times articles were used without permission to train AI systems that now compete with publishers as sources of information. OpenAI and other AI companies have argued that training models on large bodies of text is protected by fair use, a theory now being tested across lawsuits from authors, artists, music labels and news organizations.

For publishers, the issue goes beyond training data. They argue that AI chatbots and AI search summaries can answer readers’ questions using journalism without sending traffic, licensing revenue or subscribers back to the organizations that reported the information. Media Copilot has been tracking the same pressure point in coverage of Google’s AI accuracy problem and The Times’ warnings about AI companies using journalism without permission.

At the same time, publishers are taking different approaches to the AI economy. Some are suing. Others have signed licensing deals with AI companies. The Associated Press announced a deal with OpenAI in 2023, while other media companies have made agreements with OpenAI, Google, Meta and Amazon.

The sanctions motion could increase pressure on both sides. A ruling against OpenAI would give publishers leverage in court and in licensing talks. A ruling for OpenAI would strengthen the company’s argument that publishers are using discovery to intrude into user privacy and commercially sensitive systems.

Either way, the case shows that AI copyright fights are becoming data-governance fights. The central questions are no longer only what AI systems were trained on. They are whether companies can prove it, search it, preserve it and explain it in court.

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For the second time this year, Google has removed and then reinstated a Press Gazette investigation into Clickout Media from its search results after an anonymous complaint under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, restoring it only after the outlet pressed for comment. The delisted article reported that theU.K.-based marketing company had published AI-generated news stories containing factual errors and fabricated information.

The Press Gazette piece, published last week under the headline “AI reporters churn out error-strewn stories for football websites,” reported how Clickout Media acquired three established U.K. football news websites and began publishing stories under AI-generated reporter bylines that Press Gazette found contained numerous errors.

According to records in the Lumen transparency database, which publishes DMCA takedown notices Google receives, an entity identifying itself as “DRF Corp” accused Press Gazette of “willfully” copying its content and images. The complaint claimed the original work was a now-deleted Reddit post. Press Gazette said the allegedly infringing content was unrelated to its investigation. 

The latest takedown follows a similar incident in March, when Google removed a Press Gazette investigation into Clickout Media from its search results after another anonymous complaint. The article reported that the company had acquired news websites to drive traffic to its promotion of online casino content. Google reinstated the story after Press Gazette sought comment. 

The second article has since been reinstated as well after Press Gazette pressed Google for comment. But the pattern of the same target, the same anonymous complaint and a reversal by Google when challenged has drawn criticism from media industry figures, who say bad actors can exploit copyright takedown systems to remove legitimate reporting from search results while low-quality AI-generated content remains visible. 

Dominic Young, chief executive of the micropayment firm Axate and a co-founder of the SPUR Coalition on AI licensing standards, condemned the takedowns in comments posted on LinkedIn. 

“By effectively rendering copyright infringement consequence-free, and reserving the right for tech platforms to profit from it, this law created anarchy online and made copyright infringement into a business model – now being exploited by AI companies and a swarm of proxies helping them get whatever they want, regardless of what the owners say,” Young said. 

The DMCA allows anyone to file a takedown notice regardless of whether they have registered their work with the U.S. Copyright Office. Google reviews each notice to ensure it meets legal and policy requirements. It is not required to remove the reported material, but failing to act on a valid notice could expose the company to secondary liability for copyright infringement, so it usually complies. 

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CNN has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, according to the network, accusing the AI company of unlawfully copying and distributing the network’s journalism without permission.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, marks CNN’s first copyright action against an AI company, and is believed to be the first such suit filed by any television network. It alleges Perplexity scraped and redistributed CNN’s reporting to power its AI-powered search product.

According to the filing, CNN attempted to negotiate a content licensing deal with Perplexity last year but failed to reach agreement on terms.

“As a result, before and after Perplexity’s negotiations with CNN, Perplexity knew that it was not permitted to access CNN’s content or to use its trademarks or service marks,” the lawsuit states.

The network said it “actively embraces the opportunities AI creates” and has commercial partnerships with responsible industry players, including a publicly reported deal with Meta last December. But CNN drew a hard line with Perplexity.

“CNN’s lawsuit stands for the proposition that Perplexity, a company valued at tens of billions of dollars, should not be able to steal from entities that create the original content Perplexity exploits,” a CNN spokesperson said. “The public rely on high quality news journalism reported by human beings to understand their world, which is frequently dangerous and expensive to produce. Commercial operators can and must pay to make use of it.”

The statement added: “There is no free option.”

Perplexity faces similar legal challenges from other major publishers, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, News Corp, Encyclopedia Britannica, and the Japanese media company Yomiuri Shimbun. Publishers including Gannett, TIME, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel, however, have announced licensing deals with Perplexity during the same period.

In a statement, Perplexity pushed back on the premise. “You can’t copyright facts,” said Jesse Dwyer, the company’s chief communications officer.

Earlier this year, in a legal response to the Times and Tribune suits, Perplexity argued that attempts “to stop this novel technology by monopolizing facts will founder on bedrock principles of intellectual property law that have consistently permitted innovative technologies like Perplexity to exist.”

The CNN lawsuit escalates a broader confrontation between news publishers and AI companies over compensation for content used to train and power generative AI tools. Publishers have largely pursued a two-track approach: suing some AI firms while striking licensing deals with others.

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Cate Blanchett has co-founded a new nonprofit aimed at solving one of AI’s most urgent unsolved problems: the ability for any person to control how their work, likeness, and identity are used by artificial intelligence systems.

RSL Media launched Tuesday as a public benefit nonprofit, built around a deceptively simple idea: Human consent should function like a traffic light—allowed, allowed with terms, or prohibited—that AI systems can actually read and respect. The organization has already secured support from a roster of A-list entertainment figures including Javier Bardem, George Clooney, Viola Davis, Tom Hanks, Dame Helen Mirren, Steven Soderbergh, Kristen Stewart, Meryl Streep, and Dame Emma Thompson, as well as Creative Artists Agency and the Music Artists Coalition.

“AI technologies are expanding rampantly, essentially unchecked and unregulated,” Blanchett said in a statement. “In order for humans to remain in front of these technologies, consent must be the first consideration.”

The launch comes less than a year after the Really Simple Licensing standard released version 1.0 of its open protocol that lets publishers define machine-readable terms for AI training on their content. RSL Media builds on that same architecture, extending the principle of machine-readable rights from content licensing to the protection of human creative expression, identity, and likeness.

“The right to decide whether AI can use your work or identity should not be reserved for only those who can afford lawyers or have platforms big enough to be heard,” said Nikki Hexum, co-founder and CEO of RSL Media. “It is a basic human right.”

The organization covers four distinct rights areas: creative works (songs, films, books, art, photography), identity (name, image, voice, movement, personal attributes), characters (fictional figures including their names, voices, and visual depictions), and marks (logos, trademarks, trade dress, brand identifiers). Its co-founders include not only Blanchett and Hexum but also Doug Leeds and Eckart Walther, the latter being the RSS co-creator behind the original RSL standard.

The legal framework was co-authored by James Everingham, former head of engineering at Instagram and CEO of Guild.ai; Jacqueline Sabec, a partner at King, Holmes, Paterno & Soriano; and Francesca Amfitheatrof, former artistic director of watches and jewelry at Louis Vuitton and design director at Tiffany & Company.

A free, public registry launches in June. Once live, anyone will be able to verify their identity through RSLMedia.org, declare permissions for their work and likeness, and have those preferences translated into machine-readable signals that AI platforms can query before use.

The approach mirrors the logic behind IAB Europe’s compensation framework (and the earlier RSL protocol) in aiming to turn consent into infrastructure. RSL Media’s registry goes further, however, by applying that model to individuals rather than publishers, covering identity and likeness alongside creative work.

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Scott Turow, the bestselling author of “Presumed Innocent,” has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta. And he’s brought along half of the publishing industry.

Turow and his company S.C.R.I.B.E. joined forces with Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage to file a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs allege Meta built its Llama language model by copying millions of copyrighted books and journal articles, with direct authorization from CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The complaint claims Meta “briefly considered licensing deals with major publishers” but reversed course in April 2023 after the question was escalated to Zuckerberg. A Meta employee is quoted in the filing as saying: “If we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into the fair use strategy.”

The lawsuit cites specific works including Turow’s “Presumed Innocent,” Douglas Preston’s “Impact,” Peter Brown’s “The Wild Robot,” N.K. Jemisin’s “The Fifth Season,” and Lemony Snicket’s “Who Could That Be at This Hour?” The class could include authors with registered copyrights on books with ISBNs or journal articles with DOIs or ISSNs.

“All Americans should understand that the bold future promised by A.I., has been, to paraphrase the investigative writer Alex Reisner, created with stolen words,” Turow said in a statement to NPR. “It is all the more shameful that these violations of the law were undertaken by one of the richest corporations in the world.”

Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger called it “the most flagrant copyright breach in history.” The plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages, a permanent injunction, and an order requiring Meta to destroy all infringing copies.

Meta pushed back sharply. “AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,” said Nkechi Nneji, a Meta public affairs director. “We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”

The case enters a complicated legal landscape. A federal judge dismissed a different group of authors’ copyright claims against Meta last June, finding the plaintiffs didn’t present enough evidence of harm. But Anthropic settled with publishers for $1.5 billion last September after a ruling that the company had copied millions of books without consent or compensation.

Whether Turow’s case can distinguish itself from Meta’s previous win — and overcome the “fair use” defense — will be the central question.

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