# The New York Times and three newspapers sue Brave over scraped content sold to AI companies > The New York Times, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel have sued Brave in Manhattan federal court. They allege it scraped their work, sold it to AI firms and helped users skip paywalls. > > OpenCheese AI · 2026.11.04 · Web page: https://opencheese.dev/blog/the-new-york-times-and-three-newspapers-sue-brave-over-scraped-content-sold-to-a Brave built its brand on privacy. Two lawsuits filed in federal court in Manhattan on Monday describe the company as a burglar that also runs a fencing operation. The New York Times sued Brave over its web index, its paywall-blocking feature and its advertising practices, and the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar suit of their own. ## Two suits, one defendant Both cases landed on the same day in the same court. The Times brought its own complaint. The three newspapers brought another, and a correction to early coverage clarified that the plaintiffs there are the papers themselves, not the companies that run them. The Times is no stranger to this genre. It has also sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims, which makes one detail in the new filings slightly awkward for everyone involved, because Perplexity is named as one of Brave's customers. Brave is 11 years old, founded in 2015, and has raised roughly $250 million to date, according to private-market trackers. That figure is an outside estimate, not something the company or the complaints supply. ## What Brave is accused of The core allegation is that Brave scraped publishers' sites without asking, assembled the result into a searchable index, and then sold access to that index. The Times suit says the index covers more than 30 billion web pages and was built with an unidentified crawler, which left publishers unable to block it. The three newspapers say Brave sells AI companies paid access to "real-time online content from the Brave Index." Those companies, the complaint says, use it to train their models, to answer specific user queries, or both. The suits name Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as recipients, and the newspapers' complaint says there are "many" more. The Times puts the theory in vivid terms. It calls Brave a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" and writes that Brave "acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties." The filings also go after what Brave does inside the browser: - **Paywall bypass.** Brave promotes "hundreds of top publishers" as reachable through its "Paywall blocker" feature. The newspapers say users get around paywalls without the publishers' consent. - **No permission, no payment.** The newspapers' complaint says Brave "has never asked for the Publishers' permission to access their websites, much less to copy the material and provide it to users or other AI companies." It adds that Brave has never compensated them. - **Blocked blockers.** The same complaint says Brave has taken other steps that prevent publishers from blocking its access. - **Ad swapping.** The Times suit also targets the company's practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own. ## What the parties say The Times says it asked first. Spokesperson Graham James said Brave "has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct." He said the paper sued to hold Brave accountable for taking its content to power its own products and to hand it to "some of the most prominent and well resourced generative AI companies in the world." Steven Lieberman, the attorney who filed for the three newspapers, went for the metaphor with the longest shelf life. AI giants, he said, are "desperate to avoid getting caught red-handed stealing news from publishers," so Brave is selling them a back door. "Buying stolen goods secondhand doesn't make them legitimate," he said, adding that Brave "must be held responsible for laundering pirated reporting for the AI industry." Perplexity was the only named customer to reply with anything of substance. Chief communications officer Jesse Dwyer said: "The New York Times is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists. (Who could've easily identified the disinformation in this suit.)" He did not say which part of the suit he considers disinformation. Brave did not respond to requests for comment. Anthropic, Mistral and Cohere had not replied either when the reports were filed. ## What the Times wants, and what is still unknown The Times seeks an injunction and damages. The sources do not say what relief the three newspapers are asking for, and none of this has been tested in court. Everything above is allegation. The unnamed crawler is the detail worth watching. The suit says publishers could not block it, and Brave has yet to say what it is called or whether it exists as described. Until the company answers, its side of the story is about as identified as the crawler. ## Related posts - 2026.10.25 · [ChatGPT Ads expands to 26 new countries, with over 100,000 advertisers already on the platform](https://opencheese.dev/blog/chatgpt-ads-expands-26-new-countries-100000-advertisers.md): OpenAI says ChatGPT Ads is growing to 26 more countries and that more than 100,000 advertisers have used it. 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