News Corp has publicly attacked some AI companies for using its content without payment, with CEO Robert Thomson branding certain firms "crass kleptomaniacs" during the group's latest earnings announcement. He singled out browser maker Brave for particular criticism, accusing it of using masked web crawlers to scrape News Corp articles and repackaging them into near-verbatim copies sold to enterprise customers, while praising OpenAI and Meta, which have paid licensing deals with News Corp, as "principled" and "honorable" partners. The remarks underline the escalating legal and commercial battle between traditional publishers and AI firms over the unauthorised use of copyrighted material to train and power AI systems.

Thomson said News Corp was pursuing a "woo and sue" strategy, warning that companies using content pilfered by such AI firms are "in possession of stolen goods" and that further litigation is likely. He also highlighted the strong performance of the company's Digital Real Estate Services unit, including realtor.com, which grew revenue by 12 percent to $1.8 billion, as part of a wider full-year revenue increase of 7 percent to $9.03 billion; specific revenue from the OpenAI and Meta deals was not disclosed. The comments come as authors and other content creators pursue separate lawsuits against AI developers, including a $1.5 billion settlement Anthropic agreed to pay in a related case.