The New York Times and Daily News sue Brave, alleging it supplied scraped articles to AI companies

The New York Times and the publishers of the Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel each filed a copyright suit against Brave, the privacy-focused browser and search company, in federal court in Manhattan on 2 November. Brave is not an AI developer. The Times’s complaint alleges that it supplies scraped publisher content to AI companies, and the Daily News group’s complaint makes parallel allegations. Both were drafted by the same law firm.

The Times alleges that Brave built the index behind Brave Search, which Brave describes as covering “over 30 billion webpages”, with a crawler whose name it has never disclosed, so that site owners had no way to block it. It says Brave then monetised the index in two ways: through “Ask Brave”, an AI answer feature, and through the Brave Search API, sold to other AI firms for training and for retrieval-augmented generation. The complaint names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as customers, citing Brave’s own marketing, and calls Brave “an AI ‘fence’” selling stolen content. None of those companies is a defendant.

The complaints go beyond scraping. They allege that the Brave browser’s “Paywall blocker” setting lets users read paywalled articles, and that its default ad-blocking strips publishers’ advertising and substitutes Brave’s own. The Times pleads direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, circumvention of access controls under section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and unjust enrichment; the Daily News group’s complaint lists the same five counts. The Times alleges that Brave made more than $100 million from the activity. It seeks damages and a permanent injunction.

These are allegations. TechCrunch reported that Brave had not responded to its request for comment, and no defence had been filed.

The suits extend the publishers’ litigation to a layer beneath the model developers. The Times has already sued OpenAI and Perplexity, and the Chicago Tribune has sued Perplexity; here the target is a supplier of search data, which tests whether liability reaches businesses that provide an index rather than train a model. The access-control claim rests on the same statutory provision, section 1201, as the YouTube claim a federal judge let proceed against Runway days earlier.