Two groups of American newspapers sued Brave Software on November 2, accusing the browser company of copying their journalism into a search index of more than 30 billion pages and selling access to that index to artificial intelligence companies. The New York Times filed one case, and the owners of the Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a second, both in federal court in Manhattan. Brave had not responded to requests for comment when the suits were reported, and none of the claims has been tested in court.
What the two suits allege
The Times says Brave never obtained permission to access, copy or distribute its content and never paid for it. Its filing identifies more than 10 million registered copyrighted works, including material from the Times, The Athletic, Cooking, Games and Wirecutter. The second complaint says its three papers’ registered issues contain more than 2 million articles.
Both complaints bring five counts: direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, circumvention of technological access controls under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and unjust enrichment under New York law. The plaintiffs seek damages, restitution of profits, costs and attorneys’ fees, plus permanent injunctions. Both complaints demand jury trials for eligible claims.
The index at the center
The complaints quote Brave as saying its index holds more than 30 billion web pages, with millions added daily. They allege Brave has not disclosed its crawler’s name and has given site owners no way to block that crawler specifically. That leaves publishers unable to stop the collection, which is central to their case.
Ask Brave sends content copied into the index to a large language model through retrieval-augmented generation, which grounds answers in outside material. The Times says its tests produced extensive article text, including more than 400 words verbatim from a paywalled article. Another test returned 1,291 of 1,295 words through an interface endpoint.
The suits name the customers they say paid for real-time index content: Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. Those companies are not defendants, but the complaints say they used the content to train models, ground answers, or both. The Times had already sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims, so Brave extends the fight to a data supplier.
Paywalls, ads and prior warnings
Beyond the index, both suits target a browser setting called Paywall blocker, alleging it copies and displays paywalled articles without a login or subscription. The filings compare browsers in which another browser shows a subscription restriction while Brave displays article text. They also allege Brave removes publisher ads, including subscription prompts, and substitutes its own.
The Times says it warned Brave twice before suing. A letter from its intellectual-property counsel on August 11, 2025, demanded an end to the unauthorized access and use. A second letter from outside counsel on April 13, 2026, repeated the demand and argued willful infringement warranted up to $150,000 per infringement.
Why It Matters
This case tests a different link in the AI data chain. Earlier publisher suits aimed at companies that build and run chatbots, but Brave is accused of supplying the raw material: a commercial index AI firms can query in real time. If selling index access counts as distribution, every search-data supplier faces new legal risk.
The paywall and advertising claims matter separately, because they strike at how readers reach news at all. A browser that shows subscription articles without a login and swaps out publisher ads undermines the two revenues that fund reporting. That is why the case could reshape browser behavior as well as AI data deals.
Our read
The publishers chose their target carefully, and their language shows it. Calling Brave both a burglar and a fence frames the company as thief and dealer at once, a vivid claim that still has to survive a courtroom. Brave’s strongest reply is likely that an index is a finding aid, not a republication, and verbatim tests will test that reply.
Expect the AI customers named in the complaints to watch closely while staying out of the dock. An injunction against Brave’s index would force Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere to rethink their real-time web data. A settlement could instead set a price for licensed index access, moving the AI copyright fight into search plumbing.
Background
Publishers have spent three years moving from complaints about AI training to lawsuits, settlements and licensing deals, while also building shared controls to opt out of training altogether. Brave, founded in 2015 and reported to have raised about $250 million, built its reputation on privacy, making a scraping suit an awkward contrast. No court has ruled yet.
Source: Reuters report on the filings and TechCrunch coverage of the suits
0 Comments