{"id":502808,"date":"2026-03-04T07:56:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T07:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/502808\/"},"modified":"2026-03-04T07:56:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T07:56:09","slug":"news-corp-is-essentially-an-ai-input-company-chief-executive-says-after-us150m-deal-with-meta-news-corporation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/502808\/","title":{"rendered":"News Corp is essentially an AI \u2018input company\u2019, chief executive says, after US$150m deal with Meta | News Corporation"},"content":{"rendered":"

News Corp\u2019s global chief executive has described news organisations as a valuable \u201cinput\u201d for artificial intelligence, as the media empire signs an AI content licensing deal with Meta<\/a> worth up to US$50m (A$71m) a year.<\/p>\n

In an upbeat presentation, the chief executive of Rupert Murdoch\u2019s company, Robert Thomson, said the \u201creliable\u201d breaking news and information in publications like the Australian, the Times of London and Dow Jones was \u201chard to beat\u201d as an \u201cinput\u201d for AI.<\/p>\n

The Meta deal, which was revealed by<\/a> the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal earlier this week and is expected to last at least three years, will allow Facebook and Instagram\u2019s parent company to scrape News Corp\u2019s US and UK content to train its artificial-intelligence products.<\/p>\n

The outlets include the Journal and the New York Post, but the Australian mastheads, which include the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun, are not part of the deal.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re essentially an input company,\u201d Thomson told a Morgan Stanley tech conference in San Francisco on Monday ahead of the landmark Meta deal.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe great threat in the age of AI is going to be to what you might call output companies. We\u2019re an input in the way that semiconductors are an input, in the way that datacentres are an input, in the way that energy is an input.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou look at breaking news, you look at unique real estate information.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thomson, who signed a $US250m, five-year deal with OpenAI<\/a> in 2024, said the opportunities AI offered for news organisations were greater than the risks.<\/p>\n

He said he took a \u201cwoo or sue\u201d approach \u2013 in which he welcomed deals with AI companies but he would sue them if they took the publisher\u2019s content illegally.<\/p>\n

Thomson said he had a good relationship with Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI<\/a>, and spoke to him often, as he did with Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta.<\/p>\n

\u201cMark and I converse on a pretty regular basis, across WhatsApp, obviously\u201d.<\/p>\n

In Australia, News Corp has taken a more adversarial approach<\/a> to social media companies, blaming them for social cohesion issues across the globe.<\/p>\n

News Corp Australia\u2019s<\/a> executive chair, Michael Miller, called for media to present a united front against the platforms and AI companies seeking content for free.<\/p>\n

News Corp has embraced the use of AI in its journalism as well. The Australian arm of the business introduced an in-house AI tool<\/a> called \u201cNewsGPT\u201d, which some journalists have expressed concern about.<\/p>\n

The news media has 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, which has reduced the number of people who click through into news websites.<\/p>\n

The 2024 deal<\/a> with ChatGPT developer OpenAI<\/a> brought news content from the Journal, the Post, the Times and the Sunday Times to the artificial intelligence platform.<\/p>\n

Other publications, including the New York Times, have taken a different tack: suing OpenAI and Microsoft<\/a>, the startup\u2019s key backer, over the use of its content to train generative AI and large-language model systems.<\/p>\n

Meta made a multibillion-dollar investment into AI infrastructure<\/a> last year, announcing a deal worth up to $US6bn with Corning, a manufacturer of complex materials for telecoms and electronics, to supply fibre optic cables for the tech company\u2019s datacentres.<\/p>\n

Guardian Media Group signed a strategic partnership<\/a> with OpenAI in February 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"News Corp\u2019s global chief executive has described news organisations as a valuable \u201cinput\u201d for artificial intelligence, as the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":502809,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-502808","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502808\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/502809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}