News Corp blasts AI orgs over Trump book ‘theft’
News Corp has used a quarterly earnings call to blast AI companies for stealing content, pointing out that US President Donald Trump’s books have been ingested for LLM training.
The broadside by News Corp CEO Robert Thomson came as the multinational media company reported steady overall revenue (up 1% YOY to US$2.01 billion) and a total segment EBITDA result up 12% (to US$290 million). News Corp segment EBITDA is simply earnings before interest/taxes/depreciation of each of its business verticals added together.
A rare first edition of The Art of the Deal
In prepared remarks in the earnings call Friday night Australian time, Thomson made a reference that seemed designed to grab the attention of the US president.
“We believe some AI companies are stealing content, so much so that they have no doubt ripped off even the President of the United States Donald Trump, by ingesting books including ‘The Art of the Deal’ and repurposing them for profit without his permission.”
Checking on Libgen, a depository of pirated books that was used to train Meta’s LLM Llama, turns up 48 books authored by Donald Trump, including ‘The Art of the Deal’.
Inclusion in Libgen — which you can search using The Atlantic’s tool – means it is almost certain Llama was trained on Trump’s work among millions of other titles.
Trump’s books on Libgen
The News Corp CEO also pointed out that Trump’s social network Truth Social was probably being used for training.
“We expect the AI anarchists will surely have done the same with Truth Social, purloining content and data to fuel their economic engines.”
Meta has defended its actions in using pirated copyright material to train AI as “fair use”, because the content is not reproduced exactly by the AI. Copyright law currently gives no guidance on ingestion as opposed to reproduction. Meta is currently being sued for copyright violation in the US. Other companies have also used copyrighted material to train their models.
Thomson spared OpenAI from his criticism because News Corp has signed a licensing deal with the company.
“We are pleased with our principal partnership with OpenAI and trust that other AI operators strip mining our intellectual property fully appreciate their responsibilities to our company, to creativity and to the community.”
Referring to News Corp’s steady financials, Thomson struck a tone that praised the US administration for “sensible deregulation” on one hand, while condemning tariffs on the other.
“The administration’s pursuit of sensible deregulation and a sound energy policy, combined with America’s economic prowess and innate creativity, should surely produce favorable results.
“When Adam Smith spoke sagely of the power of the invisible hand, he did not envisage an economic slap in the face from the unruly introduction of exorbitant tariffs. America’s animal spirits do need emancipation from the cage of uncertainty.”
The news for News Corp in Australia was not so good, with circulation/subscription (US$306m, -3% adjusted) and advertising revenue ($259m, -4% adjusted) both down for the quarter.
In terms of audience, traffic pain continues at the international tabloids, with visitors down about 41 % at The Sun (74 m monthly uniques in Mar‑25 vs 126 m a year earlier) and 32 % at the New York Post (85m vs 125m).
The precipitous traffic drops have previously been blamed on algorithm change at Google and Meta.
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