THE SHORT VERSION

NYT sues Brave: a burglar and a fence for AI companies

Satirical cartoon: a masked lion in a BRAVE cap smashes through a PAYWALL brick wall carrying stacks of NYT newspapers and hands them to a grinning robot labeled AI, which pays him with a wad of cash. — Machine Age Cartoon · Zimbo

The New York Times sued Brave Software in Manhattan federal court on Monday, accusing the browser maker of scraping its copyrighted articles to build a search index of more than 30 billion webpages — then selling AI companies access to it.

The complaint calls Brave “a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI ‘fence’ that sells stolen content to third parties,” naming Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as buyers. The AI companies are not defendants.

The suit also targets a Brave feature that bypasses paywalls and its practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own. The publishers of the Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a near-identical suit the same day; the Times seeks an injunction and damages.