The New York Times and three other major American newspapers have filed separate civil lawsuits against Brave Software in Manhattan federal court, accusing the browser maker of scraping their journalism, sidestepping paywalls and selling access to that content to artificial intelligence companies. The two complaints landed hours apart and no court has yet ruled on either. What makes this fight notable is its target: not an AI lab, but the search engine the plaintiffs say supplies the raw material.
- Who is suing: The Times filed on Monday, while the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel — all part of the Alden group — filed a separate suit shortly after, with counsel representing MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing.
- The core allegation: Brave’s search index, which the filings say exceeds 30 billion pages, is sold through its Search API to five AI clients: Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere.
- What they want: Damages, disgorgement of profits and an injunction to stop the practice, with jury trials requested.
Inside the Allegations
According to the complaints, Brave crawls the publishers’ journalism and monetises it. The filings claim the company has not disclosed the name of its crawler, making it impossible to block by name, and that its AI answers feature reproduces passages verbatim along with detailed summaries. They further allege that a paywall-blocking feature lets readers access subscription content without an account.
The Alden papers’ complaint lists five claims: direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement; circumvention of technological measures under the DMCA; and unjust enrichment under New York law. The Times added its own copyright and DMCA claims and says more than two million registered articles are affected.
The economic argument ties the case to the wider anxiety gripping newsrooms. The plaintiffs contend that Brave blocks publishers’ ads by default while selling its own, profiting from journalism without sharing revenue. They cite a study finding that AI crawlers generate 95.7% less referral traffic than Google search — the same collapse publishers have reported as AI-driven search becomes the default entry point for a growing share of queries.
Steven Lieberman, an attorney for MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, accused Brave of “laundering pirated journalism for the AI industry.”
Brave has not commented on the lawsuits, according to the reporting.
A Longer Legal War
This is not an isolated skirmish. In March 2025, Brave asked a court to declare that its indexing of the web constitutes fair use, and in July News Corp countersued it for copyright infringement. The Times and the Alden papers also maintain separate litigation against OpenAI and Microsoft.
Brave, per the complaint itself, surpassed $100 million in revenue in 2025 and counts roughly 130 million monthly users. The dispute also has a market-based track, namely pricing content for AI, an approach Microsoft has pursued through its Publisher Content Marketplace, which sets rules and rates for AI use of publisher material.
The broader regulatory climate is shifting in parallel. Meta recently paused changes to its commercial terms that would have let it crawl the websites of businesses using its platforms, following criticism from news publishers and scrutiny from UK and EU regulators. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has opened an investigation into whether Meta’s proposed terms impose take-it-or-leave-it conditions on UK businesses, signalling that regulators now treat AI training-data acquisition as a competition question rather than purely a copyright or privacy matter. That framing strengthens the publishers’ hand: the value chain of AI, they argue, begins well before the chatbot.
Why Targeting the Index Matters
Suing Brave rather than only the model builders is a revealing strategic shift. Publishers have concluded that the AI value chain starts with whoever crawls the web, indexes it and sells that index — and hitting the single link that supplies five AI companies at once is more efficient than chasing each model individually.
Still, a complaint is not a verdict. Brave’s defence will likely rest on the fair use argument it advanced in 2025, and the outcome will hinge on whether indexing the web and reselling that index to train and feed AI is lawful. That question will shape how journalism is financed for the next decade.