News Corp is suing Brave AI, a privacy-focused search engine, alleging that the company infringed on its copyright through its AI tools. The lawsuit was announced on Tuesday by News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.
News Corp claims that Brave uses web crawlers that publishers cannot detect or block, providing “summaries” of news articles that consist of “verbatim or near verbatim copied content” to enterprise customers, primarily other AI companies. The complaint also states that before March 2025, Brave scraped and sold News Corp’s copyrighted content to competitors of News Corp’s content licensing programs.
In the lawsuit, News Corp stated, “Companies like Brave incorporated copyrighted works into their products and services to generate revenue for themselves, all while destroying the incentive for anyone to ever pay the very publishers who produced the content that Brave has monetized.” The two companies had previously tried to resolve their dispute through negotiations, with News Corp seeking a licensing agreement for a year.
Brave responded to a cease-and-desist letter from News Corp by filing its own lawsuit in February, arguing that its indexing of website content is essential for search engine operation. Brave accused News Corp of attempting to “bully Brave out of the market” on behalf of larger tech companies like Google, which has existing relationships with News Corp.
News Corp contested Brave’s claims of fair use, asserting that Brave’s AI does not transform information, but instead regurgitates it without adding anything new. News Corp CEO Robert Thomson criticized Brave’s practices, calling them “content crooks and brand brigands,” and claimed that they profit from illicitly using journalists’ work.
Thomson stated, “This era of tacky tech trafficking must come to an end if journalism is to have a sustainable future. These byte burglars and bootleggers, these content contrabandists are seriously undermining the integrity of AI and IP.”
Historically, News Corp has been critical of tech platforms, with Rupert Murdoch frequently accusing Google of stealing content. However, the company has also formed partnerships with major tech firms, including a $250 million licensing deal with OpenAI in 2024 and a $50 million annual licensing agreement with Meta earlier this year.
Thomson remarked in March, “We’re essentially an input company. The great threat in the age of AI is going to be to what you might call output companies.”
