The New York Times sued the privacy-focused browser company Brave on Monday in federal court in Manhattan, and the Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a similar suit the same day. The publishers allege, in court filings described by TechCrunch, that Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages using an unidentified crawler that publishers cannot block, then distributed and sold scraped copyrighted content to AI companies.
The suits name Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as customers Brave allegedly supplied, though those companies are not named as co-defendants. The complaints also target a Brave browser feature that the publishers say bypasses paywalls, and Brave's practice of blocking publishers' own ads on their sites while serving its own in their place. The Times calls Brave a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content," likening it in its complaint to "an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties." The suits seek an injunction and unspecified damages.
The filings extend a dispute that has been building for more than a year. News Corp, parent of the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, countersued Brave in July 2026 over similar scraping allegations, seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement; Brave had preemptively sued News Corp in 2025, arguing its indexing practices qualify as fair use. The New York Times has also separately sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar copying claims in litigation that has been ongoing since 2023.
Brave had not responded to a request for comment as of Monday evening. The case extends the publisher-versus-AI copyright fight to a new category of defendant: browser companies that sit between publishers and the AI systems trained on, or retrieving from, their content. How courts weigh Brave's crawling and paywall-bypass features against existing fair-use precedent is likely to shape not just this case but the broader question of whether browsers can act as intermediaries supplying content to AI firms without publishers' consent.
