Artificial intelligence lawsuit against Brave from four newspapers

The Brave lawsuit began with two separate petitions in federal court in New York. The New York Times, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel sued Brave Software. According to the publishers, the company collects news without permission. It also adds them to its search index. Moreover, it sells access to this data to artificial intelligence developers.

Brave lawsuit: Brave Index and Search API allegations

At the center of the case is the Brave Index. This is Brave's own search database. It has more than 30 billion web pages in it because Brave Search runs on it. Publishers also say that the company does not disclose the name of the search robot that collects content. That's why site owners cannot recognize the robot. Therefore, it cannot block its access.

Brave provides access to the index via Search API for five AI companies: Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. API, that is, the interface that allows software to access data through the program, is also mentioned in the petition. Accordingly, the API is used for training large language models and working with data. For example, Anthropic's Claude 2 tutorial demonstrated its use of this API.

Ask Brave and Paywall blocker complaints

Complaints are not limited to data sales. Publishers say Ask Brave, an AI-powered search feature, quotes sections from articles verbatim. Moreover, it also produces detailed summaries. The Paywall blocker function allows news that requires subscription to be read without logging in. Three newspapers suggest this.

Publishers emphasize one more point. Brave blocks ads on media sites by default, but it does show its own ads. Thus, it is argued that editors earn income from the content they produce. So the Brave lawsuit also involves advertising revenue.

Sanctions requested in the Brave case

The New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel revealed five alleged violations. These include direct and indirect copyright infringement. Additionally, according to the DMCA law in the USA, circumvention of technical protection and unjust enrichment are also on the list. The New York Times made separate claims regarding copyright infringement and technical protection bypass.

The three newspapers argue that more than 2 million registered articles were affected. They therefore want compensation, the transfer of profits and a permanent ban on controversial practices.

This isn't the first legal dispute for Brave. The company filed a lawsuit against News Corp in March 2025 and asked for search indexing to be considered fair use. News Corp filed a countersuit in July, accusing Brave of copyright infringement. Now the similar debate with the Brave case extends to the use of search data in the artificial intelligence sector.