The New York Times and a group of other news publishers sued Brave Software, the maker of the Brave web browser, on Monday, alleging it scraped their sites without permission, sold access to that material to AI companies and let its users get around paywalls. The Verge, citing Reuters, reports that one complaint was filed by the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, with the Times filing its own. Brave had not replied to requests for comment when the story was published.
What the complaints allege
According to The Verge’s account of the Daily News, Tribune and Sentinel complaint, Brave built an index of scraped websites and has monetized it by giving AI companies paid access to “real-time online content from the Brave Index.” Those companies, the filing says, use the index to train models, to fetch content that answers specific user queries, or both. The publishers name Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere among the recipients of what they call “stolen copyrighted content.”
The second claim concerns the browser itself. Brave promotes a “Paywall blocker” feature and advertises that it works with “hundreds of top publishers.” The complaint says Brave never asked permission to access the publishers’ sites or copy their material, lets users bypass paywalls without consent, and has taken steps that stop publishers from blocking Brave’s access. It also says Brave has never paid the publishers.
What each side says
The Times’ spokesperson, Graham James, said in a statement to The Verge that Brave “flouted established copyright law” and ignored repeated requests to stop. The attorney for the three newspaper publishers, Steven Lieberman, described Brave as selling AI companies “a back door” to journalism, and said that buying stolen goods secondhand does not make them legitimate.
Among the companies named, only Perplexity’s chief communications officer, Jesse Dwyer, had responded at publication time, with a dismissive comment about the Times’ lawyers and journalists. Brave, Anthropic, Mistral, xAI and Cohere had not replied. These are allegations in complaints, not findings by a court, and we have not seen the filings ourselves.
How it differs from earlier AI copyright suits
Most headline lawsuits so far have targeted the companies that train or run chatbots. This one goes after an infrastructure supplier: a search index sold as a data feed. That matters because many AI products do not crawl the web themselves. They rely on a licensed or rented index to ground answers. If a court treated the index operator as a direct infringer, every downstream customer would have a reason to ask where its data comes from.
The paywall claim is separate and older. Browsers and extensions that strip paywalls have drawn publisher complaints for years, but pairing that feature with an AI data business is a new framing, because it suggests content hidden behind a subscription could end up in a product sold to model builders. Whether that is factually true will need evidence from the case, not from the complaint alone.
Where consent signals fit
Publishers have two main tools to say no: the robots.txt file that crawlers are asked to respect, and newer AI-specific preferences. Last week, major labs backed a shared way to express training opt-outs, which we covered in the AI training opt-out signal. For the background, see our timeline of robots.txt and the fight over web crawling and our guide to controlling AI crawlers. The Brave complaint alleges that these signals were not enough because Brave took steps to prevent blocking, a claim Brave has yet to answer.
What it means for AI companies
Buyers of web-index data should expect more questions from lawyers about provenance, licences and whether the supplier honors opt-outs. Publishers, meanwhile, are widening their targets from model makers to the companies in between, which raises the number of defendants and the chance of conflicting court rulings.
What to watch next
- Brave’s formal response to the complaints and whether it says how its index and paywall feature work.
- Whether the named AI companies are added as defendants or asked for documents.
- Any request for an injunction affecting the Brave Index or the Paywall blocker.
- Whether other publishers file similar suits against index and data-feed providers.
- Court treatment of search-index data feeds in existing AI copyright cases.
Key takeaways
- The New York Times and three Tribune-owned papers filed suits against Brave on Monday, per The Verge.
- They allege Brave sold scraped content to AI companies and let users bypass paywalls.
- Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere are named as recipients of the index, but are not described as defendants in the coverage we reviewed.
- Everything so far is allegation; Brave had not responded at publication time.
- The case tests whether suppliers of web-index data share liability with AI model builders.
Frequently asked questions
Who sued Brave?
The New York Times filed one suit. The New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed another, according to The Verge, which corrected an earlier version that attributed it to their parent companies.
What is the Brave Index?
It is Brave’s own index of web pages, used by its search engine. The complaint says Brave also offers paid access to the index to AI companies for training and answering queries.
Does the lawsuit prove Brave broke the law?
No. A complaint sets out what the plaintiffs allege. A court would have to decide whether those claims are true and whether they amount to infringement.
