Source time Edition date
IndustryThe Verge AI
The New York Times sues Brave web browser for AI scraping and bypassing paywalls
《纽约时报》起诉Brave网页浏览器AI抓取并绕过付费墙
Brave's paid access to its scraped index forces a reckoning over whether AI training data and paywall bypassing can be justified as a product, a decision now landing on courts and publishers.
Judgment
Brave must decide whether to keep selling paid access to its scraped index and promoting its paywall blocker while defending the publishers’ suit, weighing AI revenue against litigation risk and demands to stop copying without compensation.
Basis
The complaint, filed by the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel, alleges Brave Software monetized its index by giving AI companies paid access to “real-time online content from the Brave Index” for training and query responses; it names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere and says Brave promotes “hundreds of top publishers” through a “Paywall blocker.” NYT spokesperson Graham James said Brave “flouted established copyright law” and ignored requests to stop; attorney Steven Lieberman called the index a “back door” and said “buying stolen goods secondhand doesn’t make them legitimate.” Perplexity’s Jesse Dwyer dismissed the suit’s claims. The mechanism: publishers say Brave copies and supplies their content without permission or compensation, while Brave’s browser lets users bypass paywalls.
Unclear The source does not say what damages the publishers seek, whether Brave will suspend index sales or the paywall blocker during the case, or whether the named AI companies will face separate claims.
Next Watch for Brave’s public response or a court filing that indicates whether it will keep selling Brave Index access while the lawsuit proceeds.