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 content from the Brave index “to train their own AI models” and “to respond to specific user queries.” 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.”
