NYT demands Brave shut down its paywall blocker and end deals with AI firms

The New York Times and other newspaper publishers have sued Brave Software, accusing it of bypassing website paywalls and copying and reselling journalism to AI companies without permission. The complaint names firms including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere as customers for Brave’s search-index content, which can be used to train AI models and answer user queries. It alleges direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement, as well as violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The publishers also say Brave replaces their website ads with its own, depriving them of revenue while profiting from their reporting. The Times cites estimates that Brave earned more than $100 million from the alleged conduct.

The Times seeks an order barring the practices, damages, and repayment of profits from both content use and ad substitution. A separate suit against Brave was filed by companies behind the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel. Testing found that Brave’s optional paywall-blocking feature could open a Times article; it was enabled in the browser’s default settings but could be switched off. Brave had not responded at the time of the report. The dispute adds to the Times’ wider legal campaign over AI use of journalism, including its pending case against OpenAI and Microsoft and a separate suit against Perplexity.