News Corp’s global chief executive has described news organizations as a valuable “input” to artificial intelligence, as the media empire signs an AI content licensing deal with Meta worth up to US$50m (A$71m) per year.
In an upbeat presentation, Robert Thomson, chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s company, said it was “hard to beat” having “credible” breaking news and information in publications such as The Australian, Times of London and Dow Jones as input for AI.
meta deal, which was revealed by The deal that the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal announced earlier this week and is expected to last for at least three years will allow the parent company of Facebook and Instagram to scrape News Corp’s US and UK content to train its artificial-intelligence products.
The outlets include the Journal and the New York Post, but Australian mastheads, including the Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun, are not part of the deal.
“We are fundamentally an input company,” Thomson said at the Morgan Stanley technology conference in San Francisco on Monday, ahead of the historic Meta deal.
“The biggest threat in the age of AI is to what you might call output companies. In the way semiconductors are an input, in the way datacenters are an input, in the way energy is an input, we are an input.
“You see breaking news, you see unique real estate information.”
Thomson, who signed a five-year deal worth US$250 million with OpenAI through 2024, said the opportunities offered by AI for news organizations outweighed the risks.
He said he adopted a “woo or sue” approach – in which he welcomed deals with AI companies but would sue them if they took the publisher’s content illegally.
Thomson said he has a good relationship with OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman and speaks to him frequently, as he did with Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg.
“Mark and I apparently communicate regularly on WhatsApp”.
In Australia, News Corp has taken a more adversarial approach towards social media companies, blaming them for social cohesion issues around the world.
News Corp Australia executive chairman, Michael Miller, called on the media to present a united front against platforms and AI companies seeking free content.
News Corp has also adopted the use of AI in its journalism. The Australian arm of the business introduced an in-house AI tool called “NewsGPT”, which has raised concerns from some journalists.
News media have viewed artificial intelligence and its integration into search engines as a threat to the sustainability of professional journalism as Google has integrated AI into search, reducing the number of people clicking on news websites.
A 2024 deal with ChatGPAT developer OpenAI brought news content from the Journal, Post, Times and Sunday Times to the artificial intelligence platform.
Other publications, including The New York Times, have taken a different stance: suing OpenAI and Microsoft, a major backer of the startup, over the use of its content to train generative AI and large-language model systems.
Meta made multibillion-dollar investments in AI infrastructure last year, announcing a deal worth up to US$6 billion with Corning, a maker of complex materials for telecoms and electronics, to supply fiber optic cables for the tech company’s datacenters.
Guardian Media Group signed a strategic partnership with OpenAI in February 2025.
