News Corp's AI Licensing: OpenAI, Meta & Publisher Strategy

A publisher that chose to license

News Corp was spun off from the original News Corporation in 2013, separating Rupert Murdoch's publishing assets, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and Times of London, from the television and film businesses that became 21st Century Fox. Robert Thomson has led the company as chief executive since the split, a tenure the board extended to 2030 in June 2025. [1][2]

News Corp's response to generative AI has been to negotiate licensing deals rather than to litigate, a path distinct from the New York Times, which sued OpenAI and Microsoft over unauthorized use of its articles in the same period. Thomson described News Corp in March 2026 as, in effect, an "AI input company," saying he speaks regularly with both OpenAI's Sam Altman and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg. [3]

The OpenAI deal on the timeline

On May 22, 2024, News Corp and OpenAI signed a multi-year content licensing agreement, reported at more than $250 million over five years, paid partly in cash and partly in OpenAI technology access. It gave OpenAI rights to train on and surface content from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Times of London and other News Corp titles inside ChatGPT and its other products. It was, at the time, the largest publisher licensing deal of its kind, and it was signed while the New York Times was pursuing its lawsuit against OpenAI over the same underlying question of whether training on news content requires a license. [4][5]

A second deal, with Meta

In March 2026, News Corp signed a separate multi-year AI content licensing deal with Meta, reported at up to $50 million a year over at least three years, roughly $150 million in total. The agreement gives Meta access to News Corp's US and UK reporting, both current and archival, for use in AI products and for training. It followed News Corp's earlier deals with OpenAI in 2024 and with Bloomberg. [6][7]

Atlas interpretation: Two deals with two of the largest AI labs, on broadly similar terms, make the OpenAI agreement look less like a one-off and more like a template News Corp is now applying across the field. Thomson's description of the company as an AI input supplier is a business strategy stated plainly, not our assessment of News Corp: it describes what the deals do, not whether the compensation reflects the value of the content. [3][6]