NYT Sues Brave, Wants Paywall Blocker Dead and AI Deals Ended

The New York Times wants Brave Software in the copyright doghouse. Alongside other newspaper publishers, the Times filed suit yesterday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, accusing the browser maker of illegally slipping past paywalls and peddling publishers' content to AI companies.

The complaint pulls no punches. The Times alleged Brave is the 'supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content' for its users and for major GenAI players including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. According to the lawsuit, AI companies pay Brave to pull real-time content from the Brave search index, using it to train models and answer user queries.

The money claim is hefty. Citing third-party revenue estimates, the suit says Brave has raked in more than $100 million by copying and reselling publishers' work without consent, while 'publishers have received nothing.' Brave's own website touts its Search API as powering big AI names, listing Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity and You.com.

The publishers aren't just chasing damages. The Times is demanding Brave shut down its paywall blocker and call off its deals with AI firms, per Ars Technica. That asks Brave to kill two revenue streams at once: the reading tool users like, and the data pipeline feeding AI labs.

The fight lands as news orgs keep battling over who gets paid when AI eats their content. If the Times gets its way, Brave's paywall workaround and its AI content supply business could both go dark.