Robert Thomson, CEO of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which was sued last month by Donald Trump, found a crafty way to bring Trump back into the conversation Tuesday.
The feisty and puckish exec, whose signature communiqués often include alliteration and high-flown language, cited Trump in the company’s fiscal fourth quarter earnings report. Trump’s suit was prompted by an enterprise report in News Corp’s Wall Street Journal exploring ties between the president and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Thomson’s reference cleverly avoided any direct reference to Epstein or the lawsuit, and it came after some signs of a thaw in the hot-and-cold relations between Murdoch and Trump.
In the company’s earnings release and in prepared remarks on a subsequent conference call with investors, Thomson noted the irony of Trump as an IP holder being victimized by AI. That circumstance has developed even as the president has made several moves to support major tech firms in their development of AI. Last January, he hosted OpenAI chief Sam Altman, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison and others at the White House to announce Project Stargate, an initiative targeting $500 billion in AI infrastructure spending in the U.S.
Publishers and media companies like News Corp have selectively made deals with AI firms in an effort to wring revenue from the incursion of the technology. They also have been willing to explore their legal options to fight against what they consider to be theft of their property, as in News Corp’s lawsuit last fall against major AI firm Perplexity. The suit claims that the Jeff Bezos-backed purveyor of chatbots and large-language models was trained in part on News Corp properties like the Journal, the New York Post and works published by its HarperCollins book division.
“The AI age must cherish the value of intellectual property if we are collectively to realize our potential,” Thomson said in the earnings release. “Much is made of the competition with China, but America’s advantage is ingenuity and creativity, not bits and bytes, not watts but wit. To undermine that comparative advantage by stripping away IP rights is to vandalize our virtuosity.
“Even the President of the United States is not immune to this blatant theft. The President’s books are still reporting healthy sales, but are being consumed by AI engines which profit from his thoughts by cannibalizing his concepts, thus undermining future sales of his books. Suddenly, The Art of the Deal has become The Art of the Steal.”
During the call, Thompson said Trump’s books (including the still-commercial 1987 title Art of the Deal) are being victimized by the very technology the president is championing.
“Is it fair that creators are having their works purloined? Is it just that the President of the United States is being ripped off?” Thomson asked.
“Companies are spending tens of billions on data centers, tens of billions on chips, tens of billions on energy generation – these same companies need to spend tens of millions or more on the content crucial for their success. And they need to ensure that the content eco-system remains healthy, that there is a vast range of varied and verifiable sources, and that a deeply derivative Woke AI does not become the default pathway to digital decay.
“In the meantime, we will fight to protect the intellectual property of our authors and journalists, and continue to woo and to sue companies that violate the most basic property rights.”
Asked during a Q&A period with Wall Street analysts during the call about any negatives from AI summaries provided by Google and other AI players, which are starting to siphon web traffic away from publishers, Thomson said nothing material has been noted as of yet. He said the company’s approach to AI companies is a “woo-and-sue” combination. Just like computing and energy resources, AI companies need large amounts of legally cleared content to feed into their models. “AI runs on IP,” Thomson said.
