The New York Times has sued Brave in a new lawsuit that accuses the web browser maker of scraping news articles without permission, selling that content to AI companies, and building a feature that lets users bypass publisher paywalls. A separate but related complaint was also filed by the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel, putting Brave Software at the center of one of the more pointed legal fights yet between publishers and the AI industry.
What the lawsuits allege
According to the complaint filed on behalf of the Daily News, Tribune, and Sentinel, Brave has built an index of scraped websites and turned it into a business. The company allegedly sells AI firms paid access to “real-time online content from the Brave Index,” which those companies then use to train their models, answer specific user queries, or both. The complaint claims Brave has supplied this scraped material, described as “stolen copyrighted content,” to a number of AI companies.
The filing states plainly that “Brave has never asked for the Publishers’ permission to access their websites, much less to copy the material and provide it to users or other AI companies,” and adds that Brave has taken technical steps to stop publishers from blocking its access in the first place. It also says Brave has never paid the publishers for using their work this way.
The paywall blocker at the center of the dispute
Beyond the AI training claims, the lawsuits zero in on a Brave browser feature described as a “Paywall blocker,” which the company reportedly promotes as giving access to “hundreds of top publishers.” The complaint argues this amounts to letting users read subscriber-only journalism without the outlets’ consent and without any payment flowing back to them, compounding the harm from the scraping allegations.
Which AI companies are named
The complaint names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere as among the AI companies that have allegedly received access to the Brave Index. Brave, Anthropic, Mistral, xAI and Cohere didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment. Perplexity’s chief communications officer, Jesse Dwyer, did push back publicly, saying the Times is “overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists” and suggesting the suit contains “disinformation.”
Graham James, a spokesperson for the Times, said in a statement that “Brave has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct,” adding that the goal of the suit is to hold Brave accountable both for using the content itself and for supplying it to well-resourced AI companies. Steven Lieberman, the attorney representing the Daily News, Tribune, and Sentinel, was more pointed, arguing that “Brave Software is selling them a back door to the journalism they know they have no right to” and that “buying stolen goods secondhand doesn’t make them legitimate.”
What this means for readers and Brave users
For everyday Brave users, nothing changes immediately. This is a legal fight over how the company built and monetized its search index and browser features, not a security issue or a product recall. But it does add Brave to a growing list of tech companies facing lawsuits over how they obtain training data for AI, and it raises questions about whether features marketed as conveniences, like paywall bypassing, could eventually be stripped out or restricted if the publishers prevail. Anyone who picked Brave specifically for its privacy-first positioning should know that this case is about content licensing and copyright, not about how the browser handles personal data.
The bottom line
These are fresh lawsuits, and Brave hasn’t yet responded publicly to the specific claims. Until a court weighs in, the allegations remain allegations. But the case puts a spotlight on a two-sided business model, scraping publisher content while also helping users skip around paywalls, that publishers clearly see as a double injury. Readers should expect this story to keep developing as Brave, Anthropic, and the other named AI companies eventually respond.
Source: The Verge
