NYT, Chicago Tribune, Others Sue Brave Over AI Scraping and Paywall Bypassing

Brave is facing lawsuits from The New York Times and a group of other news organizations over claims that the browser maker scraped their content without permission, fed it to AI companies for training, and built a feature that lets users dodge their paywalls entirely.

The suits, reported first by Reuters, come from the Times as well as the companies behind the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel. At the center of the complaint is something called the Brave Index — essentially a database Brave built by crawling the web, similar in spirit to how Google indexes sites for search. According to the complaint, Brave doesn't just use that index to power its own browser features. It sells access to it, offering AI companies "real-time online content from the Brave Index" that they can use to train models or to pull up answers when responding to user queries.

The publishers say that content includes material lifted straight from their sites without consent. The complaint names several AI companies it says have received what it calls "stolen copyrighted content" through this arrangement, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.

The second part of the complaint targets a Brave browser feature the company markets as a "Paywall blocker," which the lawsuit says Brave promotes as working on "hundreds of top publishers." The publishers argue this is a direct assault on their subscription business: the feature lets Brave users read paywalled articles without ever paying for them, and they allege Brave has taken technical steps to stop publishers from blocking its crawlers in the first place — meaning outlets couldn't simply wall Brave off even if they tried.

The complaint is blunt about the lack of permission involved. "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," it states, adding that Brave "has never compensated the Publishers for the unlawful use, copying, and distribution" of their work.

Graham James, a spokesperson for the Times, framed the suit as a last resort after direct appeals to Brave went nowhere. "While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, Brave has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct," James said in a statement. "We filed this lawsuit to hold Brave accountable for stealing our content to power its own products and to provide it to some of the most prominent and well resourced generative AI companies in the world."

Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and neither did Anthropic, Mistral, or Cohere. Perplexity did respond, though not to the substance of the allegations. Jesse Dwyer, the company's chief communications officer, told The Verge: "The New York Times is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists. (Who could've easily identified the disinformation in this suit.)"

The lawsuit lands at a moment when the relationship between publishers and AI companies is already strained across the industry, with outlets increasingly pushing back on being used as free training material for the tools that may ultimately compete with them for readers. What makes this case distinct is the dual accusation: it's not just about AI training data, a fight that's playing out in courtrooms elsewhere, but about a browser allegedly undermining publishers' paywalls directly, which cuts at the core of how subscription-funded journalism makes money. Whether the courts agree with the publishers' characterization of Brave's practices remains to be seen, but the case adds another front to the broader legal reckoning over who gets paid when AI systems are built on the back of other people's content.