Brave lawsuit puts your AI data supply chain in the dock

The New York Times sued Brave Software on Monday, accusing the browser maker of scraping its journalism and selling access to it to AI companies. Hours later, the publishers of the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a separate lawsuit making similar allegations. That was 2 November. According to The Next Web, both suits center on the Brave Index, a collection of more than 30 billion web pages that powers Brave Search. The publishers say Brave has never disclosed the name of the crawler it uses to collect the material.

The buyers are named. According to The Next Web, the newspapers' complaint lists Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as paying customers receiving publisher content through Brave. None of those AI firms is a defendant. PPCPPCPay Per Click (PPC) is a digital advertising model where you pay only when a user clicks your ad, not when it is merely displayed.View full definition → Land points out that the filings do not say which of the named AI companies use the APIAPIApplication Programming Interface: a standardised interface that lets applications communicate and exchange data without knowing each other's internal workings.View full definition → now, which endpoints they use, or whether any of them received Times or Tribune articles.

The detail that made people wince comes from CyberInsider: a query using the headline of an article about a robot theme park returned 1,291 of its 1,295 words verbatim through LLMLLMA Large Language Model is an AI system trained on vast text data to predict and generate language, enabling tasks like writing, summarizing, and answering questions.View full definition → Context.

This matters to data leaders because the case goes after the supply chain, not the model builders. The Tribune papers' lawyer Steven Lieberman put it this way, according to ShiftDelete: "Buying stolen goods secondhand doesn't make them legitimate." Plenty of teams buy a search feed on price and speed and never ask where the data came from.

The fight is far from settled. Brave has yet to publicly respond to the lawsuits, CyberInsider reported. Its position is already on record, though: according to The Next Web, in March 2025, Brave sued News Corp, asking a court to declare its web indexing fair use. News Corp countersued in July, accusing Brave of theft. Perplexity, which the Times is already suing in a separate case, hit back. Techaeris quotes its spokesperson: "The New York Times is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists."

Three things to watch: Brave's formal answer, whether the court treats indexing differently from handing full text to AI products, and whether the named buyers stay bystanders.