News Corp sues Brave search engine over AI copyright infringement

News Corp, the Murdoch family-owned parent company of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, announced on Tuesday that it is suing Brave AI, a privacy-focused search engine with an AI sidebar tool that integrates with large language models. The company describes itself as "the world's most complete non-Big Tech search engine."

In its complaint, News Corp alleged three main violations: Brave masks its web crawlers in a way that prevents publishers from detecting or blocking them; Brave delivers "summaries" of news articles that are "verbatim or near verbatim copied content" to enterprise customers, primarily AI companies; and 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 programs. News Corp stated in the complaint that "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 dispute had been brewing for some time. According to Tuesday's filing, News Corp had attempted to negotiate a licensing agreement with Brave for a year before resorting to the lawsuit. In February, however, Brave filed its own lawsuit against News Corp in response to a cease-and-desist letter from the publisher. Brave argued that its indexing of website content is a standard function all search engines must perform 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 maintains business relationships.

In its Tuesday filing, News Corp rejected 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 made his position blunt, calling the company "content crooks and brand brigands" who have "shamelessly stolen and then perfidiously profited from that pilfering by illicitly fencing our journalists' work." He continued: "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 an intensifying dispute over how AI companies and search engines should compensate publishers for content. News Corp had negotiated with Brave for a year to reach a licensing agreement, but those talks failed, leading to the cease-and-desist and Brave's counterlawsuit in February. News Corp's core argument is that Brave strips away the economic value of journalism by delivering near-verbatim summaries without compensation, while Brave frames itself as a search engine performing a standard function and accuses News Corp of using the lawsuit to suppress competition—particularly on behalf of Google, a major business partner of News Corp. The legal question at the heart of the dispute centers on whether Brave's AI-driven summarization and content indexing constitute fair use or copyright infringement. News Corp argues there is nothing transformative about regurgitating information without adding value, while Brave relies on the principle that search engines must be able to index content. The outcome will likely influence how other search engines, AI companies, and publishers navigate the intersection of content licensing, fair use, and AI training.