News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson used the company’s quarterly earnings call to attack AI firms that train on its journalism without paying, warning that clients of what he called “crass kleptomaniacs” are in possession of stolen goods.
Thomson said News Corp has trusted content relationships with OpenAI and Meta and is in advanced discussions with several other companies. He also accused browser maker Brave of shamelessly stealing content at scale, saying masked web crawlers scraped News Corp pages and repackaged near-verbatim copies for enterprise customers. The company is pursuing lawsuits under a “woo and sue” strategy, with Thomson noting that some of the world’s better-known companies are clients of the firms it is pursuing.
His comments came as News Corp reported full-year revenue of $9.03B, up 7 percent, with digital real estate the fastest-growing segment at $1.8B. Thomson praised OpenAI and Meta as principled and honorable, calling them benchmarks other companies should follow, and said more deals are coming along with, hopefully, not too much litigation.
The remarks land in a broader copyright fight: authors have filed several lawsuits claiming their books trained LLMs without permission, and Anthropic agreed to a $1.5B settlement fund to resolve such cases. Thomson said litigation is far from over.
