News Corp signs multi-year AI content licensing deal with Meta, reported at up to $50 million per year

What happened: News Corp signed a multi-year AI content licensing deal with Meta Platforms, first reported by the Wall Street Journal (Alexandra Bruell) on 4 March 2026 and syndicated via Editor and Publisher. The deal runs at least three years and pays News Corp up to $50 million per year, covering News Corp news content in the US and UK. Meta may retrieve new information for users of its AI products and train on other content such as story archives. Neither company publicly confirmed financial terms; the figures come from people familiar with the matter.

Why it matters to creators: This is Meta's largest known paid news-licensing commitment and a concrete compensation model for professional journalism used in AI training and answer retrieval — evidence that a paid market for publisher content exists, alongside ongoing litigation by publishers who did not license.

What is not yet known: the exact compensation structure and split between News Corp's titles, and whether the deal covers training of Llama-class models directly (reporting describes archive training plus retrieval use).