The confrontation sharpened on Monday, when The New York Times sued Brave Software in federal court in Manhattan. The paper alleged that the privacy-focused browser company scraped its copyrighted reporting and distributed it to AI customers including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. The Times cast Brave as a “supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content” for AI companies.¹

A separate suit filed the same day by the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel made the same basic case: Brave allegedly built commercial value from a web index without publishers’ permission, then offered AI companies paid access to real-time material from that index. The publishers say they were neither asked nor compensated.²

The lawsuits go beyond AI training. They target Brave’s optional paywall-blocking tool, which plaintiffs say lets users access subscriber-only articles while depriving newsrooms of subscriptions and advertising revenue. The Times also alleges that Brave blocks publishers’ ads and substitutes its own, calling the arrangement a double hit to the economics that fund reporting.³

The Times is seeking an injunction, damages and the return of profits it says Brave gained from copying and reselling publishers’ work. Its demand is sweeping: stop the alleged scraping, halt the paywall circumvention and end the alleged pipeline from Brave’s index to AI firms.³

Brave did not immediately respond to requests for comment cited in the reports. Perplexity, which is not a defendant in these Brave cases but is fighting its own lawsuit from the Times, rejected the newspaper’s account as “disinformation” without identifying specific errors in the Brave complaint.³

The legal clash is therefore bigger than one browser feature. Publishers argue that AI’s appetite for current information cannot be met by turning news into an unlicensed commodity; the companies implicated in the broader dispute face an increasingly direct test of that proposition in court.