News Corp’s global chief executive said news organizations were a valuable “input” to artificial intelligence, as the media empire had an AI content licensing deal with Meta worth up to US$50 million (A$71 million) a year.
Robert Thomson, chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s company, said in an upbeat presentation that “trustworthy” breaking news and information published in publications such as The Australian, the London Times and the Dow Jones were “hard to beat” as “input” to AI.
The meta deal, revealed by Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal earlier this week, is expected to last at least three years and will allow Facebook and Instagram’s parent company to scrape News Corp’s U.S. and U.K. content to train its artificial intelligence products.
News outlets include the Journal and the New York Post, but Australian mastheads such as the Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun are not included in the deal.
“We are essentially an input company,” Thomson said at a Morgan Stanley technology conference in San Francisco on Monday ahead of the landmark meta deal.
“The big threat in the AI era will be the so-called output companies. Just as semiconductors are an input, just as data centers are an input, just as energy is an input, we are also an input.
“Watch breaking news and see unique real estate deals.”
Thomson, who signed a $250 million, five-year contract with OpenAI in 2024, said the opportunities AI offers news organizations are greater than the risks.
He said he welcomes doing business with AI companies, but is taking a “woo or sue” approach by suing publishers if they illegally acquire their content.
Thomson said he had a good relationship with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and spoke frequently with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“Mark and I talk on WhatsApp pretty regularly, so it’s no surprise.”
In Australia, News Corp took a more hostile approach towards social media companies, blaming them for social cohesion problems around the world.
News Corp Australia executive chairman Michael Miller called on the media to put up a united front against platforms and AI companies seeking free content.
News Corp is also incorporating the use of AI in its journalism. The Australian arm of the business has introduced an in-house AI tool called NewsGPT, which some journalists have raised concerns about.
News organizations have seen artificial intelligence and its integration into search engines as a threat to the sustainability of professional journalism, as Google has integrated AI into search and the number of people clicking to visit news websites has declined.
A 2024 deal with ChatGPT developer OpenAI brings 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 tack, suing OpenAI and Microsoft, the startup’s main backer, over the use of the content to train generative AI and large-scale language model systems.
Last year, Meta made a multibillion-dollar investment in AI infrastructure and announced a deal worth up to $6 billion with Corning, a maker of composite materials for communications and electronics, to supply fiber optic cables to the company’s data centers.
Guardian Media Group entered into a strategic partnership with OpenAI in February 2025.
