NYT demands Brave shut down its paywall blocker and end deals with AI firms

The New York Times and other newspaper companies have sued Brave Software, alleging that the browser maker illegally bypasses paywalls and sells stolen news content to AI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere, making over $100 million from reselling publishers' work without consent. The lawsuit claims Brave directly infringes copyrights by scraping articles for its search index and API, and is a contributory and vicarious infringer by facilitating and profiting from users' and AI customers' copying of copyrighted content. The NYT also accuses Brave of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing technological measures to restrict access to articles. The lawsuit points to Brave's website, which states that its Search API is used by several prominent AI companies.