News Corp CEO Threatens More AI Lawsuits, Blasts Companies for Content Theft Amid Subscriber Decline

Aug 6, 2026

During News Corp's fiscal 2026 earnings call, CEO Robert Thomson reported record full-year revenues of $9.03 billion but issued a fierce warning to AI firms scraping copyrighted content. Thomson labeled unlicensed AI developers "crass kleptomaniacs" and threatened to expand litigation to their corporate clients. While News Corp maintains lucrative licensing deals with OpenAI and Meta, it is actively suing Perplexity and Brave. This legal push comes as News Corp Australia's digital subscriptions dipped slightly to 1,162,000, amid fears that AI summaries are eroding direct news traffic.

News Corp fiscal 2026 results

▪News Corp reported fiscal year 2026 total revenues of $9.03 billion, representing a 7% increase compared to $8.45 billion in the prior fiscal year.
▪News Corp reported fiscal 2026 fourth-quarter net income from continuing operations of $230 million, representing a 167% increase from $86 million in the prior year period.

AI content scraping lawsuits

▪News Corp CEO Robert Thomson threatened legal action against corporate clients who purchase AI products built on scraped, copyrighted media content, characterizing them as possessing stolen goods.
▪News Corp CEO Robert Thomson described unlicensed AI text generators and search engines as crass kleptomaniacs whose outputs would leave users drowning in a slimy sea of AI slop.

News Corp AI licensing deals

▪News Corp has established commercial content licensing partnerships with OpenAI and Meta, and is in advanced negotiations with several other technology companies.
▪News Corp CEO Robert Thomson defended the company's licensing agreements with OpenAI and Meta, stating they are not merely transactional and that News Corp's inputs are crucial to AI outputs.

Perplexity legal action

▪News Corp subsidiary Dow Jones is pursuing a copyright infringement lawsuit against AI-powered answer engine Perplexity for allegedly conducting massive illegal copying of articles.
▪Perplexity lost a motion to dismiss the copyright infringement lawsuit brought by News Corp subsidiary Dow Jones in August 2025, allowing the case to proceed.

Brave copyright infringement claims

▪News Corp CEO Robert Thomson accused browser developer Brave of using masked web crawlers to ingest copyrighted articles and repackage them for business customers.
▪News Corp has filed a countersuit against Brave over the alleged unauthorized scraping of articles from The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.

Australian digital subscriber decline

▪Publishers attribute the plateau in digital subscriber growth to AI-generated summaries, which reduce click-through traffic from search engines to mainstream news sites.
▪Digital subscriptions at News Corp Australia fell slightly from 1,166,000 to 1,162,000 during the fiscal year, reversing years of steady digital growth.