The New York Times has sued Brave Software, the company behind the Brave web browser, accusing it of getting around paywalls and passing copyrighted journalism on to AI companies.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, describes Brave as "the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content".
It claims Brave has made more than $100 million reselling publishers' work without permission, while the publishers themselves have received nothing.
The New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a similar case on the same day, with the two lawsuits numbered 1:26-cv-09549 and 1:26-cv-09554.
From search to AI
At the heart of the case is Brave's search index, which the complaint says holds more than 30 billion webpages.
The Times says the index powers Brave's own AI search tool, Ask Brave, as well as a paid service that feeds up-to-date content to other AI developers.
Brave's website lists Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity and You.com among the customers of that service.
The lawsuit also names Anthropic and xAI as companies that allegedly received the content, although none of them is being sued.
Blocking the paywall
The Times accuses Brave of copyright infringement and of breaking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a US law that bans getting around digital locks such as paywalls.
It singles out a "paywall blocker" that is switched on by default in the browser.
The newspaper says this lets Brave reach articles meant only for subscribers and then show its own adverts in place of the publisher's.
Brave shares some of that advertising money with its users, while outlets such as the Times lose out on income.
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