The New York Times Sues Brave, Calling the Privacy Browser a Fence That Sells Stolen News to AI Labs

Brave has spent a decade selling itself as the browser that protects you from the tracking web. On Monday, The New York Times went to federal court in Manhattan to argue that Brave is something else entirely: a wholesaler of other people's journalism to the AI industry.

The Times sued Brave Software on November 2. The same day, in the same court, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar suit of their own.

A burglar and a fence

The language in the Times complaint is not subtle. It calls Brave "the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content for its own users and many of the most prominent GenAI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere." Brave, it says, acts "like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties."

The complaint leans on Brave's own marketing, which describes its Search API as "trusted by the world's top AI labs."

Notice who is not being sued. The AI companies appear in the filing as customers that received the content, not as defendants. The Times has already gone after OpenAI and Perplexity directly. This time it is going after the supplier.

30 billion pages and an unnamed bot

According to the suit, Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages using a crawler that does not identify itself, which leaves publishers with no way to block it. That detail matters more than it sounds. The big AI labs recently committed to honor a single robots.txt line that blocks training scrapers, but an opt out signal only works on a crawler that announces who it is.

The second complaint fills in how the index gets used. The papers say the "Ask Brave" feature answers questions by feeding indexed content to a large language model, and that Brave sells AI companies paid access to "real-time online content from the Brave Index" for training and for answering user queries.

Then there is the browser itself. Both suits target a built in "Paywall blocker" setting that Brave promotes as giving access to "hundreds of top publishers." They also go after Brave's habit of stripping out publishers' ads while selling its own.

"Brave has never asked for the Publishers' permission to access their websites, much less to copy the material and provide it to users or other AI companies," the three papers wrote. They say they have never been paid either. Their claims include copyright infringement, contributory and vicarious infringement, breaking anti-circumvention rules under the DMCA, and unjust enrichment over the ad swapping. Between them, the Daily News, Tribune and Sentinel hold more than 2 million registered articles.

"A back door to the journalism"

Times spokesperson Graham James said Brave "has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct." The paper wants damages, disgorgement of profits and a permanent injunction.

Steven Lieberman, who represents the other three papers, went further. "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," he said. "Buying stolen goods secondhand doesn't make them legitimate."

Brave, Anthropic, Mistral and Cohere did not immediately respond. Perplexity did. Its chief communications officer, Jesse Dwyer, said: "The New York Times is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists."

Brave was founded in 2015 and has raised roughly $250 million, according to private market trackers. None of the allegations has been tested in court yet.

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