The Times sues Brave, calling the browser an ‘AI fence’ that resells stolen news

Two complaints, one defendant

The New York Times sued Brave Software on Monday, alleging that the privacy-focused browser company scraped its journalism, gave users a way around its paywall, and sold access to the resulting index to some of the largest AI developers in the world. A second complaint, filed the same day by the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, makes substantially similar allegations against the same company. Both were lodged in federal court in Manhattan.

The suits identify five buyers of Brave's data — Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere — but name none of them as defendants. Neither complaint had produced a public response from Brave by Monday evening, and the company did not immediately answer requests for comment from TechCrunch or The Verge.

The Times' complaint describes Brave as a “supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content,” and argues that the company occupies two roles at once: “Brave acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI ‘fence’ that sells stolen content to third parties.” The framing is deliberate. Rather than relitigating whether training on news is fair use, the filings describe a commercial pipeline with a seller, a price and a customer list.

What Brave is accused of selling

According to the complaints, Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages using a crawler it does not identify, which the publishers say left them with no practical mechanism to block it. Brave then sells paid access to “real-time online content from the Brave Index,” the complaints say, which the AI companies use to train models, to answer user queries, or both.

The Times suit also goes after two browser features rather than the index alone: a paywall blocker that Brave has promoted as opening up “hundreds of top publishers,” and a practice of blocking publishers' advertising while selling its own. Both allegations matter legally, because they describe harm that happens inside the browser, visible to any reader, rather than inside a training run that is hard to inspect.

“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,” the Daily News complaint states. “Brave has never compensated the Publishers for the unlawful use, copying, and distribution of the Publishers' copyrighted content.”

Frank Pine, executive editor of Tribune Publishing and MediaNews Group, put the paywall argument in commercial terms. Paywalls, he said, are a critical revenue source for newsrooms trying to fund original reporting. In his statement he accused Brave of making “a mockery of our intellectual property laws,” of pillaging the internet and reselling the proceeds, and of attempting to delete evidence of its conduct under a “Zero Data Retention” policy.

The Ask Brave example

The most concrete evidence in the filings is a demonstration. According to the Daily News complaint, a user asked Brave's “Ask Brave” feature for articles the paper had published that day. The assistant returned the titles of 35 articles sitting behind the paywall and then offered to retrieve the full text of whichever one the user wanted.

That exchange is the kind of exhibit that makes a case easier to explain to a judge: an ordinary prompt, a list of protected stories, and an offer to hand over the body text. It also frames the dispute as one about substitution — the reader never pays, never visits, and never sees an ad.

The Daily News complaint lists five legal claims and alleges direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. The Times is seeking an injunction and damages, according to TechCrunch. The filings do not put a number on the losses claimed.

Why publishers are suing the middleman

The Times has already sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar allegations, and the Daily News notes that it and other papers are litigating against OpenAI and Microsoft as well. Monday's suits take a different route. Instead of arguing about what a model learned, they target the company that assembles and licenses the raw material, and they describe the model makers as knowing recipients rather than primary infringers.

Steven Lieberman, the attorney who filed the case for the Daily News, the Tribune and the Sentinel, made the theory explicit: “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. Buying stolen goods secondhand doesn't make them legitimate.”

For Brave, the exposure is awkward because its business identity rests on privacy. The company was founded in 2015, has raised roughly $250 million according to private-market trackers, and markets an independent index as an alternative to Google's. Perplexity's chief communications officer, Jesse Dwyer, dismissed the filing in a statement to The Verge: “The New York Times is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists. (Who could've easily identified the disinformation in this suit.)”

The Times' own spokesperson, Graham James, framed the case as a matter of repeated warnings ignored. “While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, Brave has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct,” he said.

What the case will turn on

Three questions are likely to decide it. First, whether crawling and storing full articles for a commercial index is reproduction rather than the kind of transient, incidental copying that search engines have usually defended. Second, whether selling access to that index with knowledge of what buyers do with it creates contributory liability, which is the theory behind the “fence” language. Third, whether a crawler that does not identify itself can defeat the notice-and-blocking arguments site owners rely on.

The remedies matter as much as the ruling. An injunction against distributing publisher content to AI customers would cut off a revenue line and, more importantly, would force every index vendor to document where its pages came from. That is a bigger deal for the sector than one settlement cheque: several AI companies now buy retrieval and freshness from third-party crawlers rather than operating their own.

There is also a licensing angle. Publishers have spent two years signing deals with model makers while arguing that unlicensed scraping is theft. If a court treats an index sale as distribution, the price of a licence stops being a negotiating position and starts looking like a legal requirement.

What happens next is mostly procedural: Brave's response, a possible motion to dismiss, and the question of whether the five AI companies stay on the sidelines. The suits name them prominently enough that discovery could pull them in regardless. For now the record contains two complaints, several sharp quotes, and a company that has not yet said a word in public.