In recent months, Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) held discussions with several media companies, including Axel Springer, Fox (NASDAQ:FOX) (NASDAQ:FOXA) and News Corp. (NASDAQ:NWS) (NASDAQ:NWSA) about licensing their articles for use in its AI products, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Instagram and WhatsApp parent Meta offers several AI-powered products, including chatbots. The company’s discussions with media companies have focused on licensing news and other content for use across those products, the report added, citing people with knowledge of the matter.
Meta, Fox and News Corp. did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.
Axel Springer said in an email to Seeking Alpha that it does not comment on market speculation.
Some of the discussions are early and may not lead to any new deals, the report noted.
Fox and News Corp, WSJ’s parent company, share common ownership.
Meta has had a mixed relationship with publishers. The U.S> tech giant years ago completed deals valued at tens of millions of dollars to include content from The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post and others in its News tab. Then in 2022, it said it would stop paying publishers, the report added.
Meta’s decision to give less priority to news led to a fall in traffic from the company’s social media platform Facebook for many publishers. However, in recent months, some publishers said they have seen an growth in traffic from the platform, the report noted.
AI’s rapid growth has disrupted the publishing industry, with tech companies scraping websites and allegedly using the content to train their large language models, or LLMs.
Publishers have tried to limit access to their sites by AI crawlers without payment. In July, Cloudflare updated its default setting to block the crawlers unless they pay for content.
Last October, Meta announced an AI content-licensing deal with Reuters but has only started having discussions with publishers more widely in recent months, the report added.
Several of Meta’s competitors have already forged AI licensing deals across the news industry. Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI signed licensing agreements with publishers including News Corp, Axel Springer and Dotdash Meredith, now known as People Inc., while Amazon (AMZN) has one with the New York Times, the report noted.