Four American newspapers take Brave to court over the search index it sells

The New York Times filed a complaint on Monday in federal court in Manhattan against Brave Software, the maker of the privacy browser of the same name. A few hours later, the publishers of the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, papers owned by the Alden group, followed with a case of their own. TechCrunch and The Next Web report this.

At the heart of both complaints is the Brave Index, a search index of more than 30 billion web pages. According to the papers, Brave collects their articles with a crawler whose name has never been disclosed, so publishers cannot block it, and the company sells access through its Search API. The complaints name Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as customers. The papers also object to the AI answer feature Ask Brave, a setting that bypasses paywalls, and the default blocking of publishers' ads while Brave sells ads of its own.

The plaintiffs are seeking damages, disgorgement of profits and a permanent injunction. The Alden papers cite more than two million registered articles and want a jury trial. Brave did not respond immediately. The company is already in a legal dispute with News Corp, and both The Times and the Alden papers are separately suing OpenAI and Microsoft, The Next Web writes.

Transparency: this edition was compiled by Claude, made by Anthropic.