NEW YORK, March 4, 2026, 11:19 EST
- Meta is set to pay News Corp as much as $50 million annually for news content out of the U.S. and UK, specifically for its AI offerings, according to the Wall Street Journal.
- Publishers, locked in copyright disputes, are seeking paid access in a deal projected to last a minimum of three years.
- Meta is reorganizing its AI teams in an effort to accelerate how quickly it brings products to market.
Meta Platforms and News Corp have struck a multiyear content licensing deal that could see the publisher receive as much as $50 million annually, according to the Wall Street Journal. 1
This deal stands out as tech companies hunt for new, trustworthy data to power their AI—software that studies data patterns to spit out text or respond to questions. Newsrooms, for their part, are aiming to turn that frenzy into a steady income stream instead of legal battles.
Meta is making another push to strengthen Meta AI—its chatbot and assistant inside Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The company’s been touting “real-time” answers, though in practice, much of that relies on licensed content, not broad open web scraping.
News Corp CEO Robert Thomson described the company as “essentially an input company” in the AI supply chain, speaking at a Morgan Stanley tech conference, the Guardian reported. The outlet said the deal involves News Corp’s operations in both the U.S. and UK, with terms expected to run for a minimum of three years. 2
Back in December, Reuters said Meta was cutting a series of comparable deals with publishers, aimed at expanding its AI offerings. The agreements reportedly allow Meta to pull news into its chatbot and direct users to the full stories via article links. 3
Meta is shuffling teams to accelerate its AI integration across products. Business Insider said this week the company’s Reality Labs will get a new applied AI engineering group; an internal memo called for creating “the data engine that helps our models get better, faster.” 4
Meta has relied on automation and massive infrastructure, but the company still finds itself accounting for service hiccups when things go awry. On Tuesday, Facebook went down for a short period, affecting thousands across the U.S. According to Meta’s own status page, Ads Manager was also disrupted, Reuters reported. 5
Investors took the report as confirmation that Meta intends to keep pouring money into AI efforts, chasing both an edge and more data. Meta shares climbed roughly 2.6% in U.S. trading Wednesday. News Corp’s Class A stock also added about 1.3%.
Still, there’s nothing straightforward here. Smaller publishers shut out of content deals sometimes push back, and bigger competitors could bid prices up. On top of that, regulators are likely to scrutinize AI systems for both their use of copyrighted material and what they churn out.
Meta hasn’t shared details on most of its publisher deals, leaving the overall legal risk for AI trained on unlicensed data squarely in place. For publishers, there’s fresh money on the table, but it comes with a catch: they’re contributing to technology that might wind up reducing visits to their own sites.
