New York Times and Three Newspapers Sue Brave and Accuse It of Fencing Journalism to AI Firms
The New York Times and three Alden-owned papers filed separate federal suits against Brave Software, alleging it scraped their journalism, supplied it to AI companies and let users skip paywalls. Brave had not responded, and no court has ruled.
Publishers have spent two years suing AI labs. On Monday, the New York Times and three Alden-owned newspapers went after a supplier instead: Brave, the privacy-minded browser company.
The Times filed its suit in federal court in Manhattan. Hours later, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a separate complaint in the same court making broadly similar allegations, The Verge reported, citing Reuters. The papers say Brave behaves like "a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content." Those are the plaintiffs' words and allegations. No court has ruled, and Brave had not publicly responded as of Monday evening.
The centerpiece is the Brave Index, which Brave says covers more than 30 billion web pages and powers Brave Search. According to the Times complaint, Brave never disclosed the name of its crawler, so publishers could not block it by name. Brave then sells access through its Search API, the complaints say, and both name the same five alleged customers: Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. None of them is a defendant, and Anthropic, Mistral and Cohere had not replied to The Verge's request for comment.
The Times points to Brave's own marketing, which describes the API as used in "training and grounding several of the Web's biggest large language models," and to a 2023 Brave blog post saying Anthropic used the API to train Claude 2.
"Buying stolen goods secondhand doesn't make them legitimate. Brave must be held responsible for laundering pirated reporting for the AI industry." Steven Lieberman, attorney for the three newspapers
The browser is a target too
The suits do not stop at the supply chain. The papers say Ask Brave, the AI answer feature in Brave Search, returns passages from their articles word for word and writes detailed summaries of them. They also target Paywall blocker, a browser setting Brave promotes as a way to "Bypass Paywalls." The Times complaint quotes a Reddit user who said the feature let them read the paper without an account. The Alden papers add a complaint about ads: Brave's browser blocks publishers' ads by default while Brave sells its own.
The Times says it asked Brave to stop twice, in letters to CEO Brendan Eich dated August 11, 2025 and April 13, 2026, and that Brave ignored both. The second letter warned of willful infringement and enhanced statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement. "Brave has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct," NYT spokesperson Graham James told The Verge.
The legal menu is long. The Alden papers plead five counts: direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, circumvention of technical protections under the DMCA, and unjust enrichment under New York law. The Times has filed its own copyright and DMCA claims. Both sets of plaintiffs want statutory and actual damages, repayment of profits, a permanent injunction and a jury. The Times complaint names no dollar figure in its prayer for relief.
Brave knows this fight. It sued News Corp in March 2025 asking a court to declare its indexing lawful, and News Corp countersued in July. The Times and the Alden papers are also already suing OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright. The Alden complaint says Brave reported more than $100 million in 2025 revenue.
Perplexity was the only named company to answer on the record, and it skipped the legal substance. Chief communications officer Jesse Dwyer said the Times "is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists."
If a court accepts the theory that selling an index to AI developers is infringement, data suppliers could face the same exposure as model builders. If Brave wins, it could blunt an argument publishers keep leaning on. Our look at the shared AI training opt-out showed how little the industry offers publishers up front. Now the fight is moving to the back of the pipe, and the middlemen have to answer for it.
