Papers Accuse Brave of Fencing Stolen Content to AI Firms

A federal lawsuit filed Monday in Manhattan frames Brave Software as a middleman in a digital heist. The Daily News, the New York Times, and their affiliated papers allege the tech company stole exclusive reporting and resold it to major artificial intelligence developers.

The complaint describes Brave as the supplier and distributor of copyrighted material. It claims the company uses high-tech scraping tools to bypass paywalls and deliver protected content to AI giants like Anthropic and Perplexity.

According to the filing, Brave crawled and copied more than 30 billion webpages for its index. The lawsuit states the company did not identify its crawler to website owners and provided no mechanism for them to block it. This massive collection forms the basis of the alleged theft.

Brave’s business model appears to operate on two fronts. The company sells copies of publisher content to third parties for training AI models and generating user responses. Simultaneously, its own web browser grants users free access to paywalled stories. Frank Pine, executive editor at Tribune Publishing and MediaNews Group, noted that paywalls are a critical revenue source for news organizations producing original content.

The plaintiffs include The News and its Tribune Publishing siblings, such as The Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel. They argue Brave acts like a burglar and a fence. The third parties buying the data are characterized as knowing receivers of stolen goods used to build trillion-dollar businesses.

One example in the suit details a user prompt to Brave’s “Ask Brave” feature. The chatbot listed 35 articles from The News that were behind a paywall. It then offered to fetch the complete text of any chosen story. Another instance involved a user asking about Orlando politics. The bot identified a story on the governor’s race from the Orlando Sentinel and reproduced verbatim text after further prompting.

Steven Lieberman, an attorney representing the newspapers, said AI giants are desperate to avoid being caught stealing news. He argued Brave sells them a back door to journalism they know they have no right to. Lieberman stated that buying stolen goods secondhand does not make them legitimate and that Brave must be held responsible for laundering pirated reporting.

The suits list five legal claims. These include direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement. The filings add to a growing number of cases where content owners sue tech companies over the wholesale use of material for AI training. The News, The Times, and other plaintiffs are also suing OpenAI and Microsoft for similar conduct.

In a statement, Pine said Brave made a mockery of intellectual property laws. He accused the company of pillaging the internet and reselling ill-gotten gains. Pine also criticized Brave’s “Zero Data Retention” policy, suggesting it allows the company to delete evidence of its misdeeds while touting privacy for customers.

Brave Software did not respond to a request for comment. The News also reached out to Anthropic and other AI companies accused of buying the content. Those firms are not named as defendants in the lawsuits filed Monday.