News Corp’s global chief executive has described news organisations as a valuable “input” for artificial intelligence, as the media empire signs an AI content licensing deal with Meta worth up to US$50m (A$71m) a year.

In an upbeat presentation, the chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s company, Robert Thomson, said the “reliable” breaking news and information in publications like the Australian, the Times of London and Dow Jones was “hard to beat” as an “input” for AI.

The Meta deal, which was revealed by the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal earlier this week and is expected to last at least three years, will allow Facebook and Instagram’s parent company to scrape News Corp’s US and UK content to train its artificial-intelligence products.

The outlets include the Journal and the New York Post, but the Australian mastheads, which include the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun, are not part of the deal.

“We’re essentially an input company,” Thomson told a Morgan Stanley tech conference in San Francisco on Monday ahead of the landmark Meta deal.