The New York Times and several other American newspapers have sued Brave Software, accusing the company behind the Brave web browser of copying their journalism without permission and passing it on to artificial intelligence companies. The lawsuits, filed on Monday, 2 November, in a federal court in Manhattan, also accuse Brave of helping readers bypass newspaper paywalls to read paid articles for free.
According to the publishers, Brave collected copyrighted articles through automated software and stored the material in its search database, a process commonly known as web scraping. They say the company then sold access to that material through its search services, allowing AI developers to use newspaper reporting to train models or generate answers. It is important to stress that these are allegations: no court has yet decided whether Brave broke the law, and the company has not yet responded in detail.
Accused of Selling News Content to AI Firms
The lawsuits were brought by The New York Times, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel. Their complaints tell a similar story: Brave gathered articles from news websites without seeking permission or paying licensing fees, and then made that reporting available to AI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity and xAI.
The publishers describe a chain that starts with scraping and ends with commercial AI products. Brave’s search tools, they argue, collect vast amounts of information from across the web and offer it to customers who need fresh material. When those customers are AI developers, the newspapers say, their reporting becomes raw material for systems that answer questions and summarise events. Notably, Anthropic, Perplexity and xAI are named as companies that allegedly received access, but they are not defendants; the legal fight is with Brave as the alleged supplier.
Accused of Helping Readers Bypass Paywalls
Many newspapers now place at least some articles behind paywalls, asking readers to buy a subscription before they can read the full story. That model has become essential for newsrooms as advertising revenue alone no longer covers the cost of reporting.
The publishers claim Brave offers features which allow users to get around those restrictions, giving them access to paid journalism without subscribing. If readers can reach the same reporting for free, they have far less reason to pay, and subscription revenue falls. The complaints also accuse Brave of blocking publishers’ advertisements while displaying or selling its own advertising services, a claim likely to be fiercely contested, because it goes to the heart of what a browser is allowed to do on behalf of its user.
New York Times Says Brave Ignored Its Requests
The New York Times says it repeatedly asked Brave to stop using its copyrighted material without permission, but claims Brave continued its activities despite those requests. A spokesperson for the newspaper, Graham James, said the company supports responsible AI development but believes Brave has violated copyright laws. That framing is deliberate: the Times presents itself not as opposed to artificial intelligence, but as opposed to building AI products on reporting gathered without payment.
If the publishers’ argument succeeds, it would have consequences well beyond Brave. Search engines, news aggregators and AI firms all rely, to varying degrees, on material published by others. A ruling that large-scale collection for commercial AI use requires permission could force many firms to negotiate licences or change how they gather data, while a ruling the other way would leave the current, largely unlicensed model intact for material that is publicly available online.
Perplexity Rejects the Claims
Perplexity, one of the AI companies mentioned in the complaints, has rejected the allegations. A spokesperson criticised The New York Times and questioned the accuracy of its claims, although the company is not itself a defendant and does not have to answer the lawsuits in court at this stage. Its response is significant, because Perplexity has been at the centre of earlier disputes with publishers over how its AI search engine presents news content.
Brave, Anthropic and xAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Companies facing complex copyright litigation often wait until they have filed a formal response in court before setting out their defence, and any defence is likely to draw on fair use and on the difference between collecting facts, which cannot be copyrighted, and copying their expression, which can.
Another Front in the Wider AI Copyright Fight
They are part of a growing legal dispute between news publishers and artificial intelligence companies over who pays for the material that powers modern AI. The New York Times and other publications have already filed separate copyright lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft over the alleged use of their articles to train AI models, and similar cases have been brought by authors, musicians and image makers.
Publishers argue, consistently, that technology companies should obtain permission and pay for copyrighted news content used in commercial AI services. The technology companies, in their broader disputes, have challenged those claims, including through arguments about the transformative nature of AI training. The latest cases against Brave could help clarify how existing copyright rules apply to AI search engines and web scraping. For now, Brave faces allegations of copyright infringement and unlawful paywall bypassing, but no court has determined that the company violated the law.
