New York Times and Alden Newspapers Sue Brave Over AI Scraping and Paywall Bypass

The New York Times and three newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital filed federal lawsuits on Monday accusing Brave Software of systematically scraping their copyrighted content, selling it to AI companies, and letting users bypass paywalls through its browser.

Two complaints, same core allegations

The New York Times filed its suit in the Southern District of New York (1:26-cv-09549), while the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel filed a joint complaint (1:26-cv-09554) in the same court [1]. Both allege that Brave's "Brave Index" — a database of more than 30 billion web pages that powers Brave Search — was built by crawling publisher sites without permission, without identifying its crawler so sites could block it, and without compensation [3].

The Alden papers' complaint lists five causes of action: direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement; circumvention of technical protections under the DMCA; and unjust enrichment under New York law [3]. The Times brought copyright and DMCA claims [3].

Selling access to AI companies

Both complaints name the same five AI companies as customers of Brave's Search API: Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere [2][3]. Brave's own marketing describes the API's most common uses as "in training and grounding several of the Web's biggest large language models" [3]. A Brave blog post cited in the complaint says Anthropic used the API to train Claude 2 [3].

The Alden papers argue that Brave "acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties" [1]. The Times spokesperson Graham James said Brave "has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct" [1][2].

Paywall blocker and verbatim reproduction

The complaints also target Brave's "Paywall blocker" browser feature, which the publishers say lets readers access subscription content without logging in [2][3]. A Reddit user quoted in the Alden complaint said the feature let them read the New York Times "without interruption and without needing to set up an account" [3].

Exhibits attached to the Alden complaint show Brave's "Ask Brave" AI answer feature reproducing articles nearly word-for-word. Side-by-side comparisons show 96% verbatim overlap for a Daily News article about a jail guard, 88% for a Chicago Tribune story on a sexual assault allegation, 28% for a Chicago Tribune article on data centers, and approximately 42% for a Daily News article on horse carriages [6].

Brave's advertising model also challenged

The Alden papers argue that Brave blocks publishers' ads by default while selling its own advertising, letting the company profit from journalism without sharing revenue [3]. Brave reported more than $100 million in revenue in 2025 and roughly 130 million monthly users, according to the complaint [3].

Responses

Perplexity's spokesperson responded: "The New York Times is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists. (Who could've easily identified the disinformation in this suit.)" [1]. Brave, Anthropic, and xAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment [1].

Prior litigation between Brave and News Corp

The suits follow a previous clash. In March 2025, Brave sued News Corp in California federal court seeking a declaration that its web indexing was fair use [3][7]. That case was dismissed without prejudice in June 2025 [7]. News Corp then countersued in July 2026, accusing Brave of disguising its crawlers and delivering "verbatim or near verbatim" news summaries to AI companies [4]. News Corp CEO Robert Thomson called Brave "content crooks and brand brigands" [4].

Broader context

The Times and the Alden papers have also filed separate copyright lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft [1][3]. Dozens of other publishers have sued AI companies over training data, while some — including the Financial Times, News Corp, and The Atlantic — have signed licensing deals [4].