New York Times Sues Brave Over Paywall Bypass and AI Content Deals

The New York Times and a group of other newspaper companies sued Brave Software on Monday, accusing the browser maker of illegally bypassing paywalls and selling news content to artificial intelligence companies without permission.

In a complaint filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, the Times described Brave as "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."

Citing third-party revenue estimates, the lawsuit claims that "Brave has made more than $100 million by copying and reselling publishers' work without consent or permission," while "publishers have received nothing."

According to the filing, AI companies pay Brave to supply them with real-time online content from the Brave search index, material the companies then use "to train their own AI models" and "to respond to specific user queries." The Times pointed to Brave's own website, which promotes the Brave Search API as "used by some of the biggest names in AI, including Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity, and You.com."

The suit levels all the major types of copyright infringement at Brave: direct infringement, contributory infringement, and vicarious infringement. The alleged direct infringement stems from Brave scraping articles to build its search index, to power its "Ask Brave" AI search feature, and to feed the Brave API, which the complaint says "serves as an illicit source of unlicensed copyrighted material, including Times journalism, to other AI companies."

The Times further argues that Brave is "a contributory and vicarious infringer when it deliberately induces, facilitates, controls, and profits from its users' and GenAI customers' copying of the copyrighted content."

The lawsuit also alleges that Brave violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing the technological measures that the Times and other content owners use to restrict access to their articles.

According to the complaint, "The Brave Browser includes a default setting that, when activated, causes the browser to go behind website paywalls and provide the paywalled content to the user." The filing says the browser "blocks advertising that would otherwise appear on The Times's website, and instead shows its own ads, offering its users a cut of the revenue even as it deprives The Times of digital advertising revenue that helps it fund the expensive effort of producing journalism."