Newspapers sue Brave, claiming it sold stolen stories to AI rivals

Daily readers of major U.S. newspapers face a new legal battle over how their paid content is accessed and used by technology firms. The Daily News, The New York Times, and affiliated Tribune Publishing papers filed federal lawsuits in Manhattan on Monday. The suits accuse Brave Software of using automated tools to copy exclusive stories and resell that data to large artificial intelligence companies.

The complaint describes Brave as a supplier and distributor of stolen copyrighted material. It alleges the company bypassed paywalls for its own users while also providing a back door for AI firms. The plaintiffs name Anthropic and Perplexity as key buyers of this content. The lawsuit claims these third parties used the stolen text to help build their commercial products.

Brave's scraping operations covered more than 30 billion webpages according to the filings. The company did not identify its crawler or offer website owners a way to block it. This process allowed Brave to copy articles without permission from the original publishers. The suit argues this practice deprived news organizations of the revenue they earn from protecting their digital inventory.

Frank Pine, executive editor at Tribune Publishing and MediaNews Group, stated that paywalls are a critical source of income for quality reporting. He said Brave made a mockery of intellectual property laws while claiming to protect user privacy. Pine noted that the company's Zero Data Retention policy appears designed to hide evidence of its actions after scraping content.

The lawsuit includes specific examples of how Brave's Ask Brave feature interacts with users. One user asked the bot for articles published that day in The Daily News. The system listed 35 paywalled stories and offered to fetch the full text for any selection. In another instance, a user asked about Orlando politics and received verbatim text from the Orlando Sentinel's coverage of a gubernatorial race.

Attorney Steven Lieberman, who represents the plaintiffs, described Brave as laundering pirated reporting for the AI industry. He argued that buying stolen goods secondhand does not make them legitimate. The companies are now facing five legal claims that include direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement.

These new cases join a growing number of suits against tech giants for using copyrighted material to train AI models. The same newspapers are also suing OpenAI and Microsoft for similar conduct. Brave Software did not respond to a request for comment, and the AI companies accused of buying the content were not named as defendants in the Monday filings.