News Corp CEO Robert Thomson slams AI firms for stealing copyrighted material like Trumps Art of the Deal
News Corp boss Robert Thomson called on the White House to crack down on AI companies from swiping copyrighted material — warning President Trump that even his best-selling book “The Art of the Deal” was ripped off.“Is it right that his books should be consumed by an AI engine, which then profits from his thoughts by cannibalizing his concepts, thus undermining future sales of his book?” Thomson said.“Suddenly, ‘The Art of the Deal’ has become The Art of the Steal.” Thomson sounded the alarm about AI companies profiting at the expense of publishers and authors, including Trump, after The Post’s parent company reported better-than-expected quarterly earnings Tuesday.In June, Meta successfully defended itself in a federal lawsuit brought by several authors that accused the company of training its Llama artificial intelligence system on copyrighted books without permission, though the presiding judge warned that the victory doesn’t establish the legality of such practices.The case involved claims that Meta used over 190,000 protected works, including “The Art of the Deal.”“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.News Corp – whose properties also include the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and book publisher HarperCollins – is suing AI startup Perplexity for allegedly stealing content to train its language model.
The media executive said the voracious appetite of the AI firms to train their bots on proprietary content without paying for it risks eroding America’s edge over rival nations.“Much is made of the competition with China, but America’s advantage is ingenuity and creativity, not bits and bytes, not watts but wit,” he said.“To undermine that comparative advantage by stripping away IP rights is to vandalize our virtuosity.”Last month, the Trump administration rolled out its “AI Action Plan” which aims to accel...