News Corp labels some AI companies 'crass kleptomaniacs'

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation appears to have let its most acerbic writers loose on its latest results announcement, in which certain AI companies are branded "crass kleptomaniacs." CEO Robert Thomson used his prepared remarks to point out that if it weren't for all the quality content from News Corp, "users would be drowning in a slimy sea of AI slop." "We have trusted content relationships with OpenAI and Meta, and are in advanced discussions with several other companies," he added, before issuing a warning. "Under our woo and sue approach, we are taking aggressive action against those who pilfer and profit from our work. We will pursue those pilferers, and companies that are clients of these crass kleptomaniacs should know they are patently in possession of stolen goods." Thomson was just getting warmed up. He accused browser maker Brave, which he described as "a company brave in name only," of having "shamelessly stolen our content at scale" and of having "illegally, gormlessly sourced and repurposed copyrighted material for sale to third-party businesses." "Their scheming started with masked web crawlers scanning our pages to ingest copyrighted articles and continued when they repackaged those stolen files and delivered near verbatim copies to enterprise customers, undermining legitimate content commerce and the very concept of creativity." The CEO suggested the legal blast radius of such actions could be wide. "We expect our lawsuits to highlight and halt the murky, illegal behavior of AI companies who steal and flagrantly fence our precious IP," he said. "Unfortunately, some of the world's better-known companies are clients of these crass kleptomaniacs." He had kinder adjectives for companies that pay for News Corp's content, describing them as "principled" and "honorable." The CEO said the company has "more deals to come, and hopefully not too much litigation," and hailed Meta and OpenAI for setting "benchmarks that other principled companies should follow." News Corp is not alone in accusing AI companies of taking its work: authors have filed several lawsuits alleging that their books were used to train LLMs without permission or compensation. Anthropic agreed to establish a $1.5 billion settlement fund to resolve one such case. During the question-and-answer section of the earnings call, Thomson praised the company's realtor.com property site for "building proprietary IP that no AI engine can legally scrape." "No buyer or seller or agent wants housing hallucinations," he said. Nor does News Corp. Its Digital Real Estate Services segment was its fastest-growing business, with annual revenue jumping 12 percent to $1.8 billion. Across News Corp as a whole, full-year revenue reached $9.03 billion, up 7 percent. The company didn't break out revenue from OpenAI and Meta, but Thomson said News Corp's deals with them "are not merely transactional arrangements." "They are savvy distributors. Our inputs are crucial components of their outputs. As for litigation, it's far from over," he said. The old advice was never to argue with people who buy ink by the barrel. Legacy media may have lost some of its clout, but Thomson's remarks suggest News Corp has lost none of its appetite for a fight. The company also has form when campaigning against perceived foes and critics: a recent book attempts to distill its methods. (R)