NYT and other publishers sue Brave over AI scraping and paywall bypass

Publishers take Brave Software to court

The New York Times and the companies behind the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel have filed lawsuits against Brave Software, the maker of the Brave browser, according to The Verge, which cites reporting from Reuters. The publishers accuse Brave of two things: copying their articles without permission to build a search index it sells access to, and shipping a browser feature that strips away their paywalls.

What the complaints allege

According to The Verge, the complaints describe a business built on unlicensed copying. Brave crawls the web to maintain the Brave Index, and the publishers say it monetizes that index by charging AI companies for "real-time online content from the Brave Index." Those customers can then use the material to train models, answer user queries, or both.

The publishers claim Brave has supplied what they call stolen copyrighted content to a wide range of AI firms, naming Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. The reporting describes the litigation as aimed at Brave itself rather than at those AI companies.

The second strand concerns Brave's browser. The company promotes a "Paywall blocker" feature that it says makes hundreds of top publishers readable without a subscription. In the complaint, the publishers argue Brave never asked for permission to access their sites, let alone to copy and distribute the material, and has never compensated them. They also allege Brave has taken steps to prevent publishers from blocking its access in the first place.

The responses so far

Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment, The Verge reports, and neither did Anthropic, Mistral or Cohere.

The New York Times was blunt. "Brave has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct," spokesperson Graham James said in a statement, adding that the paper filed the lawsuit "to hold Brave accountable for stealing our content to power its own products and to provide it to some of the most prominent and well resourced generative AI companies in the world."

Perplexity, one of the AI companies named in the complaint, pushed back. "The New York Times is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists," Jesse Dwyer, the company's chief communications officer, said in a statement to The Verge, suggesting journalists could have easily spotted what he characterized as disinformation in the suit.

Why it matters

Until now, the legal fight over AI training data has mostly pitted publishers directly against model developers. This case pulls a new kind of defendant into the ring: a company that sits between the open web and AI firms, packaging crawled content into a paid data product. If the publishers win, middlemen that crawl and resell access to publisher content could face liability even if they never train a model themselves.

The suit also puts a browser feature under legal scrutiny. Paywall blockers have existed for years, but the complaints tie Brave's feature to a broader commercial scheme, framing it as one piece of an alleged system of uncompensated copying rather than a standalone user convenience.

For Brave, the stakes are commercial as much as reputational: paid access to the Brave Index is part of how the company funds itself. And for AI companies that rely on third-party indexes for fresh material, an adverse ruling could narrow a key supply of real-time web data — or push the industry toward the licensing deals publishers have been demanding all along.