The New York Times sued Brave Softwarethe company behind the Brave browser, accusing it of copying the newspaper’s copyrighted content without permission to resell it to artificial intelligence companies. The same Monday, the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel also filed a similar lawsuit. Both suits were filed in federal court in Manhattan.
The Times compares Brave to a “supplier, reseller and distributor of stolen content” for AI companies. The complaint does not mince words: “Brave acts both as a thief who steals publishers’ content and as an AI fence that sells stolen content to third parties”. At the heart of the accusation is a index of over 30 billion web pagesbuilt with an unidentified crawler that publishers would not be able to block.
That archive would power the Brave Index, resold for a fee to companies like Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere, who would use it both to train their models and to answer user questions in real time. The procedural papers cite specific cases: the response tool Ask Brave would have generated more than 1,200 words from a Chicago Tribune article on tax incentives for data centers, and nearly 600 words from a Daily News piece on Central Park carriages.
Also under accusation is the Paywall blockera browser feature that would allow you to override the subscriptions of “hundreds” of leading newspapers, including the Times. Publishers also complain about the practice of blocking other people’s ads and replacing them with ads sold directly by Brave.
The reactions and precedents
Graham James, spokesperson for the New York Times, leaves no room for ambiguity: “Despite believing in the ethical and responsible use of artificial intelligence, Brave violated copyright law and ignored the Times’ repeated requests to stop its illicit conduct.” It adds that the lawsuit serves to “hold Brave accountable for stealing our content to power its own products and provide it to some of the largest and best-funded generative AI companies in the world.”
For the other three newspapers, lawyer Steven Lieberman speaks, with a direct image: “AI companies desperately want to avoid being caught red-handed stealing news from publishers, so Brave Software sells them a back door to journalism they know they can’t use legitimately. Buying stolen goods second-hand doesn’t make it legitimate.”
Perplexityone of the companies cited in the story, responds through communications manager Jesse Dwyer, who dismisses the accusation by talking about high-money lawyers and underpaid journalists, “who could have easily identified the misinformation in this case.” Brave, for its part, has not yet provided any official comment.
Brave Software was founded in 2015 and has raised, according to private market trackers’ estimates, approx 250 million dollars of financing. The Times, which previously sued OpenAI and Perplexity on similar charges, is now seeking an injunction and damages.
