The New York Times has stopped chasing only the AI labs. It is now chasing the vendors that feed them. That shift matters more than the headline suggests.
The Times sued Brave on Monday in federal court in Manhattan. The complaint says the privacy-focused browser company scraped copyrighted articles and distributed them to customers it names as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. The same day, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar suit in the same court.
The language is aggressive. The Times calls Brave a “supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content” and says it acts like “a burglar” and an AI “fence.” The suit claims Brave built an index of more than 30 billion webpages with an unidentified crawler, so publishers could not block it. It also goes after a browser feature that bypasses paywalls, and after Brave’s practice of blocking publishers’ ads while selling its own.
That last point is the odd one. Brave built its brand on privacy and ad blocking, and the Times is turning that pitch into evidence of a double standard. Whether a judge buys it is another question.
Here is why this is a bigger deal than another copyright filing. Brave runs one of the few independent search indexes outside Google and Microsoft Bing, and its Search API has become a popular way for AI companies to ground answers in fresh web data. If a court decides that selling index access can amount to distributing infringing content, every search API vendor has a problem. That includes smaller players that resell crawled data, and it raises questions for any lab that buys it.
The Times has already sued OpenAI and Perplexity, so this is a pattern. First came training data, then answer engines, and now the infrastructure underneath. Publishers have learned that suing individual labs is slow and that licensing deals, like those OpenAI and others have signed with news organizations, work better when the alternative is expensive litigation. Going after a supplier adds pressure at a different point.
Brave has raised roughly $250 million since its 2015 founding, according to private-market trackers. That is real money, but it is not OpenAI money. A well-funded legal campaign could hurt a company of that size in ways it would not hurt a frontier lab. Brave had not responded to a request for comment at the time of reporting.
The Times wants an injunction and damages. The injunction is the part to watch. If Brave has to change how it crawls or what it sells, its AI customers will need new sources, and they will likely look at licensed feeds. For developers building on third-party search APIs, now is a good time to ask vendors where their data comes from.
