The publisher lawsuits over AI content have reached the browser. The New York Times sued Brave, the privacy focused browser company founded in 2015, in federal court in Manhattan on Monday, alleging that Brave scraped the newspaper’s copyrighted content and unlawfully distributed it to AI customers the suit names as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. The Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit the same day, also in Manhattan.
The Times, which has also sued OpenAI and Perplexity on similar claims, describes Brave as a supplier, dealer and distributor of stolen copyrighted content for AI companies. The complaint says Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages using an unidentified crawler, leaving publishers unable to block it. It also targets a Brave browser feature that bypasses paywalls and the company’s practice of blocking publishers’ advertisements while selling its own.
The legal theory matters beyond one browser. Earlier publisher cases have concentrated on the companies that train and serve models. A claim against an intermediary that crawls, indexes and resells content would, if it succeeds, attach liability to the supply chain that feeds retrieval and training pipelines, and give publishers a lever over distribution rather than only over model outputs.
Brave has raised roughly 250 million dollars to date, according to private market trackers. The Times seeks an injunction and damages. Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment.