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

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

“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,” the NYT alleged in a lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Citing third-party revenue estimates, the suit claimed that “Brave has made more than $100 million by copying and reselling publishers’ work without consent or permission,” while “publishers have received nothing.”

The lawsuit said, “AI companies pay Brave to provide them with real-time online content from the Brave search index [and use that content] to train their own AI models, or to access content they use to respond to specific user queries… or both.” The NYT lawsuit points to 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.”

The lawsuit accused Brave of all the major types of copyright infringement: direct infringement, contributory infringement, and vicarious infringement. The lawsuit claims Brave infringes copyrights directly by scraping 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 NYT accused Brave of being “a contributory and vicarious infringer when it deliberately induces, facilitates, controls, and profits from its users’ and GenAI customers’ copying of the copyrighted content.” Finally, the lawsuit said Brave violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by circumventing technological measures the NYT and other content owners use to restrict access to their articles.

“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 said. 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 said.

When testing the Brave browser for Mac today, we found that the optional “paywall blocker” feature made it possible to read a paywalled New York Times article. The feature was enabled in the default settings and can be turned off.

NYT wants Brave profits

The NYT asked for a permanent injunction to stop Brave from continuing the allegedly illegal conduct. The lawsuit 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 similar lawsuit was filed against Brave in the same court yesterday by the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel companies. We contacted Brave and will update this article if it provides a response.

Perplexity, which is not a defendant in the Brave lawsuit but is facing a different lawsuit filed by the NYT, accused the news organization of “disinformation” in a statement provided to Ars and other news outlets. Perplexity’s statement did not identify any specific inaccuracies in the lawsuit against Brave.

“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 said.

The NYT sued Perplexity in December 2025, alleging that its AI tool gives users “outputs that are identical or substantially similar to” NYT articles, including “verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgements of the original content.” Perplexity’s response to that lawsuit said its answer engine only fetches content from copyrighted articles in reply to user queries. Perplexity 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.”

The NYT also sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023 in a lawsuit alleging that OpenAI trains its AI with stolen news content. The lawsuit is heading toward a trial, with OpenAI arguing that its use of news articles is fair use under copyright law.