The New York Times and three other US newspapers have sued Brave Software in federal court in Manhattan, alleging that the browser company collected copyrighted journalism without permission and supplied it to artificial intelligence businesses.
The Times brought its own case, while the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit on the same day. The complaints target an intermediary in the supply of online material to AI companies, rather than focusing solely on the developers of AI models and chatbots.
The Times alleges that Brave scraped its articles and unlawfully made the material available to companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. Those assertions are allegations in the lawsuit, not findings by a court. The Times is seeking damages and an injunction.
A central allegation concerns the way Brave collected material for its search index. The complaint says the company built an index covering more than 30 billion web pages using a crawler that did not identify itself, leaving publishers unable to block it. Web crawlers are automated systems that retrieve pages for purposes such as indexing and search; the dispute concerns whether Brave's collection and subsequent distribution of publishers' work were lawful.
The Times also challenges a Brave browser feature that it says bypasses paywalls. Its complaint criticizes the company's practice of blocking publishers' advertisements while selling advertising of its own. Together, these allegations extend the dispute beyond the initial copying of articles to the ways Brave allegedly provides access to, and commercially benefits from, publishers' content.
Brave, founded in 2015 and known for its privacy-focused browser, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The available reporting does not establish how the company will respond to the specific allegations or what defenses it will raise.
The Times has separately pursued legal action against OpenAI and Perplexity over the use of its journalism. The Brave cases add to a wider set of disputes over the collection of news content and its role in AI products, including services that generate answers to users' questions.
Those disputes involve several distinct uses of copyrighted work. Material can be collected to train a model, or retrieved later to help a system produce an answer. Licensing agreements can authorize particular uses, but the existence and scope of permission matter: access to an article on the web does not by itself resolve whether copying or redistributing it is lawful.
Alongside litigation, publishers have been negotiating commercial agreements with technology companies over access to their journalism. Those arrangements can cover the use of news as reference material in AI services and other product partnerships. In the Brave litigation, the Times is asking the court both to award compensation and to order relief against the conduct it challenges.
Sources: AI Insider, Press Gazette