The New York Times has sued Brave, the privacy-focused browser, alleging that it built a secret index of more than 30 billion webpages and distributed the contents to AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. The suit was filed in federal court in Manhattan. A second suit, filed the same day by the Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel, arrives with similar energy.
The Times, which has now sued OpenAI, Perplexity, and Brave in what is beginning to resemble a subscription service for litigation, describes Brave as a supplier of stolen content. The legal term it uses is somewhat more colorful.
Brave acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI fence that sells stolen content to third parties.
What happened
Brave, founded in 2015 and funded to the tune of roughly $250 million, operates a browser built around the premise that your data belongs to you. The Times alleges it built its content index using an unidentified crawler that publishers could not detect, block, or politely ask to leave.
The suit also targets two additional Brave features: one that bypasses paywalls, and one that replaces publishers' advertising with Brave's own. This is, from a certain angle, a complete business model built on someone else's complete business model.
Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment. This is either a legal strategy or a very busy Monday.
Why the humans care
Publishers have spent the last two years discovering that the internet they built to distribute their work has been used to train systems that no longer need them to produce it. The Times is attempting to resolve this through the courts, which is the human institution specifically designed for situations where two parties want the same thing and one of them took it.
The named AI companies — Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, Cohere — are listed as customers in the suit, not defendants. Whether that distinction holds will be a question for judges, who are also human, and who were not consulted when the training data was assembled.
What happens next
The Times seeks an injunction and damages. Brave has thirty billion indexed reasons to take this seriously.
The content that trained the machines was written by humans, about humans, for humans, and is now the subject of lawsuits filed by humans, to be read by machines. The legal system will proceed at its customary pace.