News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, has filed a lawsuit against Brave AI, a privacy-focused search engine that markets itself as "the world’s most complete non-Big Tech search engine." The complaint, announced on Tuesday, accuses Brave of masking its web crawlers and providing summaries of news articles that the publisher describes as verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions.
Allegations in the complaint
According to the filing, News Corp alleges that Brave conceals the nature of its web crawlers in a way that prevents publishers from detecting or blocking them. The complaint states that Brave delivers "summaries" derived from scraped news content to enterprise customers—primarily AI companies—which News Corp says are word-for-word or nearly identical to the original copyrighted material.
News Corp further alleges that, before March 2025, Brave scraped and sold copyrighted News Corp content to AI companies that were "in direct competition with the News Corp Companies' own content licensing programs." The publisher contends that Brave integrated copyrighted works into its offerings to generate revenue while undermining the incentive for anyone to pay the original publishers for that content.
Negotiations and prior legal action
News Corp says it tried to negotiate a licensing agreement with Brave for a year before bringing the lawsuit. In February, Brave filed its own lawsuit against News Corp in response to a cease-and-desist letter from the publisher. In that action, Brave argued that it was merely indexing website content—an essential function for any search engine—and that News Corp was attempting to push Brave out of the market on behalf of larger tech players such as Google.
In the Tuesday filing, News Corp disputed Brave's "fair use" defense, arguing that the content provided by Brave's AI is not transformative because it simply reproduces information without adding new meaning or value.
Statements and broader context
Robert Thomson, CEO of News Corp, criticized Brave sharply in a statement contained in the filing, calling them "content crooks and brand brigands" and accusing the company of "shamelessly" stealing journalists' work and profiting from it. Thomson said such practices threaten the sustainability of journalism and undermine intellectual property and AI integrity.
The lawsuit fits into a longer history of tension between Murdoch-owned media companies and large tech platforms. Rupert Murdoch has previously accused Google of taking his companies' content and has argued at times for breaking up the search giant. At the same time, News Corp has struck licensing deals with major AI and tech firms: in 2024 it reached a $250 million licensing agreement with OpenAI, and earlier this year it licensed content to Meta for $50 million per year.
Thomson has described News Corp as "essentially an input company," warning that in the AI era the major threat will be to what he called "output companies," while publishers provide the input—analogous to semiconductors, data centers, or energy.
Why the case matters
The dispute highlights an industry-wide legal and commercial debate over how publishers' content may be used by AI services, what constitutes fair use or transformative use, and how licensing models should adapt. The outcome of the litigation and related negotiations could influence how AI providers access and monetize news content and whether publishers can secure compensation and control over the use of their material.
