New York Times sues Brave over AI scraping and paywall bypassing

The company behind the Brave browser and search engine is facing two new copyright lawsuits. The New York Times sued Brave Software in federal court in Manhattan on Monday, and the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a separate complaint with similar claims, The Verge reports, citing Reuters.

What the publishers allege

Both suits focus on the Brave Index, a collection of more than 30 billion web pages that powers Brave Search. The publishers say Brave sells access to that index through its Search API, and that AI companies use it to train models, answer user queries, or both. The complaints name Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as customers. They also say Brave never disclosed the name of its crawler, so sites could not block it by name.

The second target is Brave's paywall-bypassing features. The Times calls Brave a supplier of "stolen copyrighted content" and argues its products are designed to get around the technical measures publishers use to control access.

What they want

The Alden-owned papers bring claims of direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, DMCA circumvention and unjust enrichment, covering more than two million registered articles, and want damages, repayment of profits, a permanent injunction and a jury trial. The Times filed its own copyright and DMCA claims. Brave had not commented at the time of the reports.

Why it matters

Most AI copyright cases target model makers. These go after a data supplier in the middle, which could make search APIs a new pressure point. For more on the publisher fight, see our report on Meta's business terms for AI crawling.