News Corp files countersuit against Brave over AI copyright

News Corp has filed a countersuit against Brave Software, accusing the privacy-focused browser and search engine company of copyright infringement for allegedly scraping and reselling articles from its publications to artificial intelligence firms. The lawsuit, filed on July 21, 2026, in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, escalates a legal battle that began last year.

The media giant, which owns The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, alleges that Brave engaged in "flagrant theft" by disguising its web crawlers to bypass publisher restrictions and then selling "verbatim or near verbatim" summaries of copyrighted content to AI companies. News Corp claims this activity occurred before March 2025 and directly competed with its own content licensing business. The company is seeking an injunction to halt the alleged practices, the destruction of databases containing the material, and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement.

This legal action is a response to a preemptive lawsuit Brave filed against News Corp in March 2025. Brave had sought a declaratory judgment that its web-crawling and indexing practices constituted fair use, a move it...