The New York Times and several other newspaper companies have sued Brave Software in federal court in Manhattan, alleging that the browser maker illegally bypasses paywalls and sells copied news content to artificial intelligence companies. The complaint, filed November 2 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, asks the court to shut down the Brave paywall blocker and to end the company’s content-supply arrangements with AI firms, according to reporting by Ars Technica.
In the filing, the Times describes Brave in unusually blunt terms, calling the company a middleman for material it says was taken without permission.
“Brave is 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 suit claims that “Brave has made more than $100 million by copying and reselling publishers’ work without consent or permission,” while “publishers have received nothing.”
How the Brave Paywall Blocker Works in Practice
At the center of the case is a browser setting. “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 lawsuit says. The Times’ complaint stresses that the Brave paywall blocker operates through that default setting.
Ars Technica tested the behavior independently. Reporters there said that when they used the Brave browser for Mac, the optional “paywall blocker” feature made it possible to read a paywalled New York Times article. The outlet reported that the feature was enabled in the default settings and can be turned off by the user.
Selling the Search Index to AI Companies
The second strand of the complaint concerns Brave’s commercial relationships with AI developers. “AI companies pay Brave to provide them with real-time online content from the Brave search index,” the lawsuit says, and those companies use content from the Brave index “to train their own AI models” and “to respond to specific user queries.”
The Times points to Brave’s own marketing as evidence. The complaint cites Brave’s website, which says the Brave Search API is “used by some of the biggest names in AI, including Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity, and You.com.”
Three Theories of Copyright Infringement
The lawsuit accuses Brave of all of the major forms of copyright infringement: direct, contributory and vicarious. On direct infringement, the Times says Brave copies articles when it scrapes them for its search index, for its “Ask Brave” AI search feature, and for the Brave API, which the complaint describes as “an illicit source of unlicensed copyrighted material, including Times journalism, to other AI companies.”
On the secondary theories, the Times says 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 complaint adds a claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, alleging that Brave circumvented technological measures the Times and other content owners use to restrict access to their articles.
The Advertising Substitution Claim
The newspaper also objects to how Brave handles ads. 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,” the lawsuit says.
The relief sought reflects that dual grievance. The Times asked for a permanent injunction to stop Brave from continuing the allegedly illegal conduct, and the suit seeks statutory damages, actual damages, restitution of profits derived from alleged copyright infringement, and “restitution and disgorgement of all revenue and profits Brave obtained through its ad-substitution scheme.”
A Second Suit From Tribune and Daily News Publishers
A similar lawsuit was filed against Brave in the same court on the same day by the companies behind the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel. “AI giants are now desperate to avoid getting caught red-handed stealing news from publishers, so Brave Software is selling them a back door to the journalism they know they have no right to,” said Steven Lieberman, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.
“Buying stolen goods secondhand doesn’t make them legitimate. Brave must be held responsible for laundering pirated reporting for the AI industry.”
Ars Technica said it contacted Brave for comment and would update its article if the company responded.
Perplexity Calls the Filing Disinformation
Perplexity is named in the complaint as a customer of the Brave Search API but is not a defendant in the Brave case. It is, however, fighting a separate New York Times lawsuit, and it responded to the Brave filing with a sharp statement provided to Ars Technica and other outlets: “The New York Times is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists. (Who could’ve easily identified the disinformation in this suit.)” Perplexity’s statement did not identify any specific inaccuracies in the lawsuit against Brave.
The Times sued Perplexity in December 2025, alleging that its AI tool gives users “outputs that are identical or substantially similar to” Times articles, including “verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgements of the original content.” Perplexity’s response to that case said its answer engine only fetches content from copyrighted articles in reply to user queries, and argued that “developing an AI tool that can allegedly automatically fetch and provide specific content in response to user requests based on its pre-configuration and access to materials available on the Internet” is not “volitional conduct.”
Part of a Widening Legal Front
The Brave cases land while the Times’ earlier litigation against OpenAI and Microsoft, filed in December 2023, moves toward trial. That suit alleges OpenAI trains its AI with stolen news content; OpenAI argues its use of news articles is fair use under copyright law.
The outcome of the Brave dispute could shape whether AI firms can rely on third-party search indexes as a source of publisher content, and whether a browser feature like the Brave paywall blocker survives as a default. Investors have been watching the sector’s legal and financial exposure closely, as seen in recent scrutiny of tech stocks tied to the AI boom, and in the mounting local resistance that has prompted companies to warn about slower data center expansion.
