This week, global policy tensions, ad gains, and AI copyright battles dominated headlines. In today’s MadTech Daily, we discuss Dentsu weighing sale of global unit, YouTube and Fox striking a short-term deal, and Omnicom surpassing WPP in UK ad spend.

Donald Trump has warned of tariffs on countries imposing digital services taxes, targeting the UK, France, Italy, and Spain. The former president said such measures “discriminate” against US tech giants like Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple.

Meanwhile, in the retail sector, Walmart reported a 46% year-over-year surge in ad revenue, boosted by its Vizio acquisition and a 31% increase in Walmart Connect’s US performance. However, despite total revenue climbing to USD$177.4bn (£132bn), profits missed expectations, sending shares lower.

In AI news, Anthropic has settled a class action lawsuit from US authors over claims its Claude models were trained on pirated books, avoiding a trial. The agreement details will be disclosed soon, according to the plaintiffs’ lawyer.

Perplexity is also trying a different approach. The company announced a USD$42.5m (£31.6m) revenue pool to pay publishers for articles used in AI answers, funded by its new premium service, Comet Plus. Publishers will receive 80% of the subscription revenue, with current partners including Time, The Independent, and Der Spiegel.

While Perplexity seeks to build goodwill with publishers, it faces fresh legal challenges in Japan, where media groups Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun have filed a lawsuit alleging the company copied and stored articles without permission and bypassed technical safeguards.