Brave accused of selling paywalled news stories to AI firms
Newspapers allege the tech company scraped 30 billion pages to resell exclusive content to Anthropic and Perplexity.
By Rebecca Svoboda ·
Newspapers in New York, Chicago, and Orlando have sued Brave Software for allegedly stealing their paywalled articles to sell to major artificial intelligence companies. The lawsuits were filed in federal court in Manhattan on Monday.
The Daily News, the New York Times, and affiliated publications including The Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel claim Brave uses automated tools to copy exclusive stories without permission. The papers describe the company as a middleman that buys stolen content and resells it to AI giants like Anthropic and Perplexity.
The complaint states that Brave crawled more than 30 billion web pages to build its index. It did not identify itself as a crawler and did not give website owners a way to block its access. The papers argue this process allows Brave to bypass the paywalls that help fund their reporting.
The lawsuit says Brave sells copies of this content to third parties for two main purposes. First, it helps train AI models and products. Second, it informs the answers that AI chatbots give to users. The papers also claim Brave’s own browser gives its users free access to material that normally requires a subscription.
One example in the suit shows a user asking Brave’s “Ask Brave” feature for articles published that day in The Daily News. The bot listed 35 paywalled articles and offered to fetch the full text if requested. In another instance, a user asked about Orlando politics. The bot identified specific stories from the Orlando Sentinel and reproduced their text verbatim after further prompting.
Frank Pine, executive editor at Tribune Publishing and MediaNews Group, said in a statement that Brave has made a mockery of intellectual property laws. He noted that paywalls are a critical revenue source for news organizations trying to produce original content in a competitive market.
Steven Lieberman, an attorney for the publishers, said Brave acts like a fence selling stolen goods to AI companies that know the content is taken. He argued that buying the reporting secondhand does not make it legitimate. The suit lists five legal claims for direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement.
Brave Software did not respond to a request for comment. The publishers also contacted Anthropic and other AI firms accused of buying the content. Those companies are not named as defendants in the Monday filings, which join a growing number of cases against tech giants over AI training data.
