News Corp is scoping out the potential for a multi-licensing LLM portfolio strategy, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The media group, which struck its first licensing deal (reportedly to the tune of $250 million spread over five years) with OpenAI in May 2024, is pursuing branching out — a logical move, since AI licensing deals tend to be non-exclusive by design.

News Corp CEO Robert Thomson described the media group’s strategy as a “woo and sue” approach in an August earnings call, and was understood to be directly negotiating with the LLM players during this window, although Digiday was unable to establish the exact names of whom he met with.

Google began AI licensing talks with a selection of publishers in the summer, but has been far less vocal about its partnerships than AI rival OpenAI. News Corp has used Google’s product set (Gmail, Google Workspace, etc.) for years, and since the summer, it has been looking at how to work more closely with Google Gemini (which powers Google AI Overviews), according to Digiday sources. News Corp declined to comment on whether it was speaking with Google about AI licensing.

Speaking at The Times Tech Summit in London on Oct. 21, Thomson said News Corp had a partnership with Google and “significant” partnerships with OpenAI and Apple, but that not every tech company was conscious of its social or commercial responsibilities. “Clearly, it has a social consequence when you have fewer journalists; clearly, it has a social consequence if the ability to write books in a meaningful, sustainable way is undermined. And there are people who are aware of that, Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai at Google, Tim Cook, you can talk with them in a way that they understand their business needs to have this constant creative flow,” said Thomson.

He criticized AI firms for pouring billions into chips and data centers while putting little back into the newsrooms and creators whose work fuels their LLMs. “It’s much more important to do big deals with the larger, reputable players,” he said at the conference. “And they, you know, they’re starting to recognize that need, in part because AI is retrospective, and they need news to remain and keep the AI engines fresh. And so that immediacy that news organizations can provide is essential to them.”

Meanwhile, Dominic Carter, evp and publisher of The Sun referenced the so-called woo and sue stance last week at Digiday’s Publishing Summit Europe in Lisbon. “You have to do your deals where it’s appropriate, whether it’s in our case with OpenAI or with Google and possibly others,” Carter said, having previously spoken about how it uses Google’s LLM-powered research and notetaking tool NotebookLM.

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“You know – if you steal our content, do something or we’ll sue you — but otherwise, we’re very happy to take your money,” said Carter.

Google has recently worked with publishers on curated “featured notebooks” in NotebookLM, including The Economist’s World Ahead 2025 report and The Atlantic’s “How to Build a Life” advice series by Arthur C. Brooks.

A Google spokesperson said, “We have a long history of collaborating with publishers, and we’re evolving our partnerships to help the news ecosystem harness the benefits of AI. We’ve said that we’re exploring new types of partnerships and product experiences, but we aren’t sharing details about specific conversations at this time.”

Thomson’s comments on the need for AI companies to maintain competitive LLMs by gaining access to premium journalism could provide fertile ground for publishers’ future revenue diversification. And a signal that media groups like News Corp aren’t betting on a single LLM but are evaluating whether it can make deals with multiple LLMs.

The elephant in the room when it comes to Google is how would this squares given the trouble Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode have caused to publishers’ referral traffic, including the titles within News Corp’s portfolio, which include the Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, and British tabloid The Sun.

News Corp isn’t alone in seeking multiple LLM revenue streams. On Tuesday, People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel stressed that it had noted a major change in attitude from most AI companies after it started to block AI crawlers in the summer (courtesy of Cloudflare’s update). “It was very effective. It brought almost everyone to the table,” said Vogel during the earnings call. I expect, and I think the punditarit [sic] also expects there will be more deals happening. Hopefully, we’ll have some news for you over the coming months and quarters over deals, that could be both sort of the all-you-can-eat deals and à la carte. So we feel very good about that. The value of our content is becoming clear to people. That is very important.”

In the same earnings update, People Inc. attributed its dip in programmatic ad revenue to Google’s AI Overviews in its third-quarter earnings call.

U.K. regulator, the Competition Markets Authority (CMA), has designated Google with “strategic market status (SMS) in general search and search advertising services,” and will soon consult industry stakeholders on appropriate interventions. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has been among those to submit evidence to the regulator.

In an Oct. 10 announcement, the CMA clarified that Google’s Gemini AI assistant is not in scope of the designation, although it will be kept under review, and confirmed that its other AI-based search features, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode, are classified as SMS.

Multiple LLM revenue streams and non-exclusive deals

While no precise detail has been divulged about how the woo and sue approach works, publishers have more options when it comes to blocking access to unwanted AI scraping, thanks to moves made by CDN vendors like Cloudflare and Toblits. They can now block and unblock at will if an LLM agrees to pay.

True to form, News Corp sued Perplexity in October 2024 for alleged “massive illegal copying” of content without permission or compensation to generate responses for its users, diverting traffic and revenue from News Corp’s publications in the process. In August, a judge rejected Perplexity’s bid to have the lawsuit dismissed. The case is ongoing.

It’s yet to be seen whether News Corp will negotiate any other lump-sum deal akin to its OpenAI deal, but there has been a general shift away from those deal structures toward more pay-per-usage deals, as publishers have woken up to just how dependent LLMs are on fresh, up-to-date, quality information to RAG from.

News Corp will have its fiscal first-quarter 2026 earnings call on November 6 at 5 pm ET.

Publishers and LLMs alike have never courted exclusivity in their contracts. That would be counterproductive for both sides, noted Aaron Rubin, partner in the strategic transactions & licensing group at law firm Gunderson Dettmer. “The default expectation is that these deals are going to be non-exclusive,” he said.

For publishers, exclusivity wouldn’t make sense because it would limit their ability to have multiple LLM-driven revenue streams. For the tech companies, it likewise wouldn’t make sense to limit options to one publisher, he stressed.

“There’s a general presumption when both parties come to the table that they’re both going to be pursuing deals elsewhere,” he added.

Wider collective efforts

Sources told Digiday that News Corp’s scale as one of the largest news conglomerates has emboldened its leadership to negotiate directly with major AI platforms. In contrast, smaller entities may lack the resources to cut equitable deals, and IAB Tech Lab has been attempting to corral publishers into action in recent months.

For example, after a tricky start, the technical body’s Content Monetization Protocols, or CoMP, AI working group is now penciled in for weekly meetings to help them navigate the torrent of change upon them.

Its central aim is to help publishers define their content for LLMs, instruct them on how to crawl it, and inform them of the costs – colloquially, this approach has been dubbed “crawl me maybe” by the involved parties. However, sources told Digiday that introducing a “permissioned wall” system — i.e., the much-vaunted pay-per-crawl model — poses significant infrastructure challenges.

Industry consultant Krish Raja explained some of the priorities publishers will have to juggle as they move from the traditional “unwalled model” historically favored by most publishers. He added, “There’s a lot of infrastructure considerations, for example, how can DSPs [demand-side platforms] crawl your content to maintain your ad revenue model?”