News Corp reports $200,000 in Q2 lobbying as AI copyright disputes intensify

The maintenance of six-figure lobbying expenditures despite vague public disclosures suggests News Corp is shielding its primary regulatory objectives as AI training becomes a critical revenue driver. Immediate pressure centers on the FCC’s ownership review, which could restrict further broadcast consolidation, while the Anthropic settlement validates News Corp's thesis that high-quality editorial data is a premium AI input. For the broader ecosystem, this signaling indicates that major publishers will continue aggressive legal and legislative pushes to secure mandatory compensation from LLM developers. Watch for News Corp's Q3 fiscal results to see if recent licensing deals with Meta and OpenAI begin to materially impact digital revenue segments.

News Corp has increasingly positioned itself as an 'AI input' company rather than a traditional publisher. Per The Guardian, March 2026, CEO Robert Thomson recently negotiated a licensing deal with Meta worth up to $50 million annually, supplementing a five-year, $250 million agreement signed with OpenAI in 2024. These deals allow platforms to scrape content from The Wall Street Journal and The Times for model training, though Thomson has emphasized a 'woo or sue' strategy to protect intellectual property from unauthorized usage. This approach was bolstered in July 2026 when a federal judge gave final approval to a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and a class of authors and publishers, the largest in copyright history according to Mashable. The ruling penalized Anthropic for using datasets derived from pirated sites like LibGen for AI training, requiring the destruction of those files.

Simultaneously, the regulatory environment for broadcast assets is tightening. In February 2026, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation convened hearings to examine the 39% national television audience reach cap, per official Senate records. While some lawmakers argue the cap is an antique of the pre-streaming era, others maintain that relaxing these limits could lead to unprecedented media consolidation. News Corp’s interest in these rules is coupled with its pursuit of statutory licensing proposals, which, per Poynter reports in March 2026, would require AI firms to pay a set fee to all publishers whose content is used for training. This legislative push aligns with News Corp Australia’s recent launch of corporate copyright licenses designed specifically to de-risk AI-driven content sharing.