The New York Times sued Brave Software on Monday, accusing the company behind the Brave browser of scraping its journalism and selling access to it to artificial intelligence companies. Hours later, the publishers of the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a second lawsuit with similar allegations. Both cases were brought in federal court in Manhattan.
The newspapers describe Brave as “a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI ‘fence’ that sells stolen content.” That language appears in the complaint filed by the three papers, which are owned by Alden Global Capital through MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing.
What does the lawsuit allege Brave did?
At the center of both suits is the Brave Index, a collection of more than 30 billion web pages that powers Brave Search. According to the publishers, Brave has never disclosed the name of the crawler it uses to collect that material. That matters because websites can block automated crawlers by name. If the bot’s identity is hidden, publishers have no easy way to keep it out.
Brave sells access to the index through its Search API. Both complaints name the same five customers: Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. The newspapers point to Brave’s own marketing, which describes the API’s most common uses as “in training and grounding several of the Web’s biggest large language models.” They also cite a Brave blog post saying Anthropic used the API to train Claude 2.
The complaints go further than the data sold to outside companies. The publishers argue that Brave’s own AI answer feature, called Ask Brave, reproduces their work. They allege it returns passages word for word and produces detailed summaries of their articles.
Does Brave's Paywall blocker let users read paywalled articles?
The lawsuits also target a browser setting called Paywall blocker, which Brave promotes as a way to get around paywalls. According to the three newspapers, the feature lets users read subscription content without logging in. Their complaint quotes a Reddit user who turned on the feature and said they could read the New York Times “without interruption and without needing to set up an account.”
Brave’s advertising model is another point of contention. The browser blocks publishers’ ads by default and sells its own ads in their place. The three Alden-owned papers say that arrangement lets the company profit from journalism without sharing the revenue with the outlets that produce it.
The Times said in a statement to The Verge that it had repeatedly asked Brave to stop. “Brave has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct,” said Graham James, a Times spokesperson. “We filed this lawsuit to hold Brave accountable for stealing our content to power its own products.”
Steven Lieberman, the attorney who filed the suit for the three newspapers, offered a sharp assessment of the AI companies involved. “AI giants are now desperate to avoid getting caught red-handed stealing news from publishers, so Brave Software is selling them a back door to the journalism they know they have no right to,” he said. “Buying stolen goods secondhand doesn’t make them legitimate.”
The newspapers say their claims include direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, circumvention of technical protections under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and unjust enrichment under New York law. The Times has also filed its own copyright and DMCA claims, according to the legal news service MLex.
Why do publishers say AI search hurts their revenue?
The broader fight behind the suits is about traffic. Publishers worry that AI-powered search, a form of zero-click search, is pulling readers away from their sites. The three newspapers cite a study finding that AI crawlers generate 95.7% less referral traffic than traditional Google search. That leaves publishers with fewer chances to turn their reporting into advertising and subscription revenue.
The Alden-owned papers say more than two million of their registered articles are affected. They are seeking statutory and actual damages, repayment of profits and a permanent injunction, and they have asked for a jury trial.
Brave is not new to this kind of litigation. In March 2025, the company sued News Corp, asking a court to declare its web indexing fair use. News Corp countersued in July, accusing Brave of theft. The Times and the Alden-owned papers have also filed separate copyright lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft.
According to the newspapers’ complaint, Brave reported more than $100 million in revenue in 2025 and has about 130 million monthly users. Brave did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuits.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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