News Corp sues Brave over AI copyright infringement

News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, filed a lawsuit against Brave AI on Tuesday. In the complaint, News Corp alleged that Brave, which describes itself as "the world's most complete non-Big Tech search engine," employs several tactics to extract and profit from copyrighted news content without authorization.

According to News Corp, Brave masks its web crawlers so that publishers cannot detect or block them. More critically, the company alleged that Brave delivers "summaries" of news articles that are "verbatim or near verbatim copied content" to enterprise customers, primarily AI companies. News Corp also claimed that before March 2025, Brave scraped and sold copyrighted News Corp content to AI companies that were in direct competition with News Corp's own content licensing business. In its complaint, 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 engaged in licensing negotiations for a year before the dispute escalated to litigation. However, in February, Brave filed its own lawsuit against News Corp in response to a cease-and-desist letter from the news publisher. In that filing, Brave argued that it was simply indexing website content, "which all search engine operators must do to exist," and accused News Corp of attempting to "bully Brave out of the market" on behalf of larger tech players like Google, with whom News Corp has existing business relationships.

In its Tuesday filing, News Corp pushed back against Brave's fair use defense, arguing that Brave's AI is not transformative because it merely regurgitates information without adding anything new. News Corp CEO Robert Thomson issued a statement sharply critical of Brave's conduct: "They have shamelessly stolen and then perfidiously profited from that pilfering by illicitly fencing our journalists' work. Instead of a license, they have licentiously looted with blatant disregard to the severe damage done to the information eco-system. 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."

The lawsuit reflects a fundamental disagreement over how AI companies and search engines may use published content. News Corp argues that Brave's delivery of verbatim or near verbatim summaries to customers constitutes infringement that destroys the incentive for publishers to license their work, while Brave contends that indexing website content is a necessary function of search engine operation and qualifies as fair use. The fact that News Corp pursued licensing negotiations for a year before suing suggests the companies could not reach agreement on compensation or terms—a pattern that may repeat across the media and AI industries.

Brave's February countersuit, in which the company accused News Corp of colluding with larger competitors like Google to exclude smaller players, adds a competitive dimension to what is ostensibly a copyright dispute. News Corp CEO Robert Thomson's heated language—calling Brave "content crooks," "byte burglars," and "bootleggers"—underscores the stakes for publishers: if AI companies can freely use and resell news content without licensing fees, the revenue model for journalism may collapse. The outcome of these competing lawsuits will likely establish precedent for how AI search engines can legally use and summarize published content.

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