The New York Times sued Brave Software on Monday, accusing the browser maker of scraping its journalism and selling access to it to AI companies.
Hours later, the publishers of the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a separate lawsuit making similar allegations.
Both cases were brought in federal court in Manhattan, and both focus on the same part of Brave’s business: its search index and the data it makes available to AI developers.
Brave acts like “a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI ‘fence’ that sells stolen content,” the three newspapers say in their complaint, which we have reviewed.
Steven Lieberman, attorney for the MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, said in a statement:
“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. Brave must be held responsible for laundering pirated reporting for the AI industry.”
New York Times spokesperson Graham James told Reuters that the company had repeatedly asked Brave to stop using its journalism, but the browser maker had ignored those requests.
The three newspapers have brought five claims: direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, circumvention of technical protections under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and unjust enrichment under New York law.
At the heart of both lawsuits is the Brave Index, a collection of more than 30 billion web pages that powers Brave Search. The publishers say Brave has never disclosed the name of the crawler it uses to collect the material.
That matters because websites can block automated crawlers by name, leaving publishers unable to identify and exclude a bot whose identity is unknown.
Brave then sells access to the index through its Search API. Both complaints identify the same five customers: Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. Brave’s own marketing describes the API’s most common uses as “in training and grounding several of the Web’s biggest large language models.”
The newspapers also cite a Brave blog post stating that Anthropic used the API to train Claude 2, in the context where the AI company is now preparing for a major IPO.
The complaints extend beyond the data supplied to other AI companies. The publishers argue that Brave’s own AI search features reproduce their work, too. Ask Brave, the AI answer feature in Brave Search, allegedly returns passages word for word and produces detailed summaries of their articles.
Another target is a browser setting called Paywall blocker, which Brave promotes as a way to bypass paywalls. The three newspapers say it allows users to access subscription content without logging in.
Their complaint quotes a Reddit user who switched on the feature and found they could read the New York Times “without interruption and without needing to set up an account.”
The newspapers also challenge how Brave makes money from advertising. Its browser blocks publishers’ ads by default while allowing Brave to sell advertising of its own. The three Alden-owned publications argue that this lets the company profit from journalism without sharing the revenue with the publishers who produce it.
There is a broader concern behind the legal claims: publishers fear that AI-powered search is taking readers away from their websites.
The three newspapers cite a study finding that AI crawlers generate 95.7% less referral traffic than traditional Google search, leaving publishers with fewer opportunities to turn their journalism into advertising and subscription revenue.
The Alden-owned papers say more than two million registered articles are affected. They are seeking statutory and actual damages, repayment of profits and a permanent injunction, and have requested a jury trial.
Brave reported more than $100m in revenue in 2025 and has around 130 million monthly users, according to the newspapers’ complaint.
The company has already faced a legal fight over its indexing practices. In March 2025, Brave sued News Corp, asking a court to declare its web indexing fair use. News Corp countersued in July, accusing Brave of theft.
The Times and the Alden-owned newspapers have also filed separate copyright lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft.