The New York Times is suing the makers of Brave Browser for unauthorized copying of journalism and copyright infringement for allegedly scraping publisher content to sell to AI companies and enabling customers to bypass its paywall. Although Brave positions itself as a white company that benefits consumers, the lawsuit paints a picture of a black hat company that exploits the work of publishers.
Brave Browser and Brave Search enjoy a reputation as a white hat, privacy-first company that’s an alternative to companies like Google, Anthropic, and ChatGPT. The New York Times’ complaint shows that not only is Brave scraping and monetizing publisher content, but it’s also selling it to AI companies, painting a picture of a company that is more black hat, at least to publishers.
Brave Browser And Search Engine
Brave Browser And Search Engine
Brave Browser and Brave Search positions themselves as the “good guys” on the Internet by casting themselves as the solution to an Internet that’s broken by surveillance capitalism. It positions itself as the antidote to Google’s aggressive monetization of its own users.
Brave Search’s unique selling points are that it uses its own independent search index, it protects user’s privacy, and it does not track them across the Internet the way Google does. All of that is true.
The New York Times’ copyright infringement lawsuit against the makers of Brave Browser and Search Engine reveals a darker reality behind the gleaming “user-first” stance in which Brave is alleged to exploit the work of journalists without compensation.
New York Times Alleges Brave Are The Bad Guys
The New York Times lawsuit is a challenge to an alternative business model that instead of exploiting its users the way Google does it exploits the work of publishers on the internet by selling access to that content to AI companies, and uses it to provide answers that compete with the publishers’ own websites.
The complaint alleges:
- Unauthorized copying of copyrighted content
Brave allegedly scraped and copied Times content without permission in order to build its search index, including content protected by paywalls. - Selling copyrighted journalism to AI companies
Brave allegedly monetizes scraped content through its Search API which enables companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, and others to access publishers’ content for AI training and generating responses. - Generate AI answers that replace visits to publishers
The Times complaint alleges that the Ask Brave AI chat reproduces and summarizes copyrighted articles in AI-generated answers, providing substitutes for the original journalism rather than directing readers to the publisher’s website. - Circumventing paywalls and access restrictions
Brave is alleged to enables users to bypass The New York Times’s paywall through its browser and deliberately circumvents protections designed to restrict unauthorized access. - Preventing publishers from blocking scraping
The Times lawsuit alleges that Brave does not identify its crawler or provide publishers a way to block its scraping activities. - Profiting from publishers’ advertising
Brave is allegedly removing The Times’s advertising and substituting its own, depriving the publisher of advertising revenue while monetizing journalism it did not produce. The implication here is that if Brave is depriving The New York Times of advertising revenue then it may be depriving the average recipe site, news site and any other site that earns income through advertising. - Contributing to copyright infringement by others
The lawsuit also alleges that Brave deliberately enables and profits from copyright infringement committed by its customers, including AI companies that pay for Brave’s data. - Continuing infringement despite warnings
The Times alleges that Brave ignored cease-and-desist letters sent in August 2025 and April 2026, supporting its claim that Brave’s infringement was willful.
How Brave Exploits Internet Publishers
Brave allegedly provides unauthorized copies of Times journalism through its Search API, allowing third parties to use that content without obtaining licenses from The Times. The content that Brave scrapes off publisher sites is alleged to be sold to AI companies which then can use it to train their large language models. That same content is also sold to be used by AI Chat as grounding content that’s surfaced through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
The complaint cites Brave’s own marketing of its Search API for AI training, grounding, and content extraction as evidence that Brave knowingly promotes uses that The Times considers infringing. This is part of the complaint’s allegation that Brave deliberately created its products to exploit copyrighted content by making it available to third parties, including creating features that bypass publishers’ paywalls.
Takeaways
The inference that can be made here is that if Brave is doing this to The New York Times, it’s likely doing it to other websites that publish content on the Internet, whether it’s a recipe site, a product review site, or any other kind of website that earns income from showing advertising.
Overall, the New York Times lawsuit (PDF) paints a picture of browser, search, and AI companies as parasites who, if they’re not exploiting users’ privacy, they’re exploiting the rest of the Internet while depriving publishers of the ability to earn income from their content.
