News Corp Goes Full Scorched Earth on AI 'Kleptomaniacs'
News Corp's latest earnings call was less financial results presentation, more strongly worded legal threat with some revenue figures attached. CEO Robert Thomson came prepared, and he did not hold back.
Thomson opened by arguing that without quality journalism from publishers like News Corp, users would be left wading through what he called a 'slimy sea of AI slop.' Fair point, arguably. He then confirmed existing content deals with OpenAI and Meta, describing both as 'savvy distributors' setting standards others should follow. Compliments dispensed, he moved swiftly to the threats.
For those not playing ball, Thomson coined what may be the most quotable legal strategy in recent corporate history: 'woo and sue.' Companies willing to pay get the woo. Everyone else gets the sue. Thomson warned that clients of unauthorised AI scrapers are, in his words, 'patently in possession of stolen goods.' Lawyers will presumably be in touch.
Brave, the privacy-focused browser, received particularly vivid treatment. Thomson accused it of hiding behind masked web crawlers to hoover up copyrighted News Corp articles, then repackaging and selling near-verbatim copies to enterprise customers. He described Brave as 'brave in name only,' which, given the circumstances, landed better than most CEO wordplay usually does. News Corp has filed suit.
The wider implication Thomson was pushing: this isn't just a News Corp problem. Several well-known companies, he suggested, are quietly paying clients of these scrapers, apparently unaware or unconcerned that the underlying content was nicked. That's the kind of statement that tends to make corporate legal departments nervous.
News Corp is hardly alone in pursuing this fight. Authors have been filing similar cases for a couple of years now, arguing their books were used to train large language models without permission or payment. Anthropic recently agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement fund to resolve one such action, which suggests at least some AI companies are starting to appreciate the legal exposure.
On the earnings side, the company had a decent year. Full-year revenue hit $9.03 billion, up 7 percent. Its Digital Real Estate Services segment was the standout, growing 12 percent to $1.8 billion annually. Thomson made a point of crediting realtor.com for building proprietary data that, he said, no AI system can legally scrape. 'No buyer or seller or agent wants housing hallucinations,' he noted. Hard to argue.
Revenue figures from the OpenAI and Meta deals weren't disclosed, but Thomson was at pains to frame them as something more than simple licensing arrangements. Strategic partnerships, naturally. The litigation, he added, is far from finished.