NewsCorp accuses search engine Brave of AI copyright infringement | Semafor

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News Corp accuses search engine Brave of AI copyright infringement

Max TaniMedia Editor, Semafor

Jul 21, 2026, 8:57pm EDTJul 21, 2026, 8:57pm EDT

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The Scoop

News Corp, the Murdoch family-owned parent company of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, is suing an AI company that describes itself as “the world’s most complete non-Big Tech search engine.”

On Tuesday, News Corp announced that it is suing Brave AI, a privacy-focused search engine with an AI sidebar tool that plugs into large language models.

In its lawsuit, News Corp alleged that Brave masks its web crawlers such that publishers<br>cannot detect or block them, and delivers “summaries” of news articles that are “verbatim or near verbatim copied content to enterprise customers, primarily AI companies.” The company also alleged 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.”

“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,” News Corp alleged in the complaint.

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The two companies had previously attempted to resolve this dispute outside of court; according to Tuesday’s filing, News Corp had tried to negotiate a licensing agreement with Brave for a year.

But in February, Brave filed its own lawsuit against News Corp in response to a cease-and-desist from the news publisher, arguing that Brave AI was simply indexing website content, “which all search engine operators must do to exist.” The company also argued that News Corp was 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 filing Tuesday, News Corp pushed back against Brave’s claims that its website indexing represents “fair use,” arguing that Brave’s AI was not transformative because it regurgitates information without adding anything new.

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In a statement, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson described the company as “content crooks and brand brigands.”<br>“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,” he said. “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.”

Know More

The Murdoch-owned media companies historically have taken a more skeptical and at times pugilistic view towards tech platforms. Over the past several decades, patriarch Rupert Murdoch has accused Google of stealing his companies’ content and has at points argued that the search giant should be broken up.

Still, the company’s leaders have increasingly leaned into partnerships with major tech platforms. After negotiating a series of licensing agreements with Google, in 2024, News Corp struck a $250 million licensing deal with OpenAI, and earlier this year, News Corp licensed content to Meta for $50 million a year.

“We’re essentially an input company,” Thomson said in March. “The great threat in the age of AI is going to be to what you might call output companies. We’re an input in the way that semiconductors are an input, in the way that data centers are an input, in the way that energy is an input.”

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