The New York Times sued Brave Software on Monday, accusing the privacy-focused browser maker of crawling its journalism without permission, stripping the paywalls that protect it, and selling the result onward to AI companies. In a separate complaint filed the same day in the same Manhattan federal courthouse, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel brought substantially similar claims.
The Times' language is blunt. Brave, it alleges, is a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" — acting "both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties."
Named in the suit as recipients of that content are Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere — a list that maps almost exactly onto the companies building answer engines and frontier models on top of web data.
Two technical allegations carry most of the weight. First, that Brave assembled an index of more than 30 billion web pages using a crawler the publishers say they could not identify and therefore could not block with robots.txt or a firewall rule. Second, that a Brave feature designed to bypass paywalls — and the company's habit of blocking publishers' ads while serving its own — converts that index into a substitute for visiting the sites at all.
Brave, founded in 2015 and reported to have raised roughly $250 million, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Times is seeking an injunction and damages.
The case is the latest move in a widening campaign by publishers who have concluded that suing AI companies one at a time is too slow. The Times has already sued OpenAI and Perplexity; what is new here is the target. Brave does not train a model. It supplies the pipe — and the suit is an attempt to establish that the pipe, not just the model, carries liability.
That framing matters beyond Brave. Every browser, search API, scraping vendor and data broker that sits between the open web and a model is now on notice that publishers intend to treat the middle of the supply chain as a defendant, not a neutral utility. Brave may argue its crawler and its paywall-bypass option are user-controlled features; the publishers' complaint is precisely that scale plus a tool is what makes the harm.
