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The New York Times sued Brave Software in federal court in Manhattan on Monday, and the Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a similar suit the same day.
The Times says Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages with a crawler publishers cannot identify or block, and sold the copyrighted content to customers the complaint names as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. It calls Brave a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content."
The suit also targets a browser feature it says gets around paywalls, and Brave's practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own. The Times wants damages and an . Brave did not respond to TechCrunch.
This is a new kind of target. The publishers' earlier suits went after the model makers; this one goes after the search index sitting between the open web and several of them, which is where an injunction would cut off supply to every customer at once.
The New York Times sues Brave, calling it a dealer of scraped news to AI companies
The New York Times sued Brave Software in federal court in Manhattan on Monday, and the Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a similar suit the same day. The Times says Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages with a crawler publishers cannot identify or block, and sold the copyrighted content to customers the complaint names as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. It calls Brave a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content." The suit also targets a browser feature it says gets around paywalls, and Brave's practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own. The Times wants damages and an injunction. Brave did not respond to TechCrunch.
This is a new kind of target. The publishers' earlier suits went after the model makers; this one goes after the search index sitting between the open web and several of them, which is where an injunction would cut off supply to every customer at once. SourcesB
Sources
- BNew York Times and other outlets sue web browser Brave over alleged content scraping (TechCrunch)techcrunch.com
This story ran in the Afternoon Brief of November 2nd 2026.