The New York Times calls on Brave to shut down its paywall blocker and end deals with AI companies

The New York Times and other news companies sued Brave Software yesterday, alleging that the browser maker illegally circumvented paywalls and sold stolen news content to AI companies.

“Brave is the provider, reseller, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content to its own users and many of the most prominent GenAI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere,” The New York Times alleged in a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Citing third-party revenue estimates, the suit claimed that “Brave made more than $100 million by copying and reselling the publishers’ work without consent or permission,” while “the publishers received nothing.”

The lawsuit states that “AI companies pay Brave to provide them with real-time online content from the Brave search index” and use content from the Brave index “to train their own AI models” and “to respond to specific user queries.” The New York Times lawsuit references Brave’s website, which claims that the Brave Search API is “used by some of the biggest names in AI, including Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity and You.com.”

The lawsuit accused Brave of all major types of copyright infringement: direct infringement, contributory infringement, and indirect infringement. The lawsuit claims Brave directly infringes copyright rights by removing articles for its search index, for its “Ask Brave” AI search feature, and for the Brave API that “serves as an illicit source of unlicensed copyrighted material, including Times journalism, to other AI companies.”

The New York Times accused Brave of being “a contributory and indirect infringer when it knowingly induces, facilitates, controls, and profits from its users’ and GenAI’s customers’ copying of copyrighted content.” Finally, the lawsuit says Brave violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by circumventing technological measures used by The New York Times and other content owners to restrict access to their articles.

“The Brave browser includes a default setting that, when enabled, causes the browser to go behind the website’s paywalls and serve paid content to the user,” the lawsuit states. The browser “blocks advertising that would otherwise appear on The Times’ website, and instead displays its own advertisements, giving its users a share of the revenue while depriving The Times of the digital ad revenue that helps fund costly journalism production efforts,” the lawsuit says.