The Daily News, the New York Times, and affiliated newspapers filed federal lawsuits in Manhattan Monday accusing the technology company Brave Software of using high-tech scraping tools to illegally plunder their websites for exclusive news stories to resell to A.I. giants, including Anthropic and Perplexity.

A Manhattan Federal Court complaint, filed by the News and affiliated Tribune Publishing newspapers the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, says Brave acts as“the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content” and provides a back door circumventing paywalls to its own users as well as prominent generative A.I. companies to help build their businesses.

“Brave acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI ‘fence’ that sells stolen content to third parties,” the lawsuit alleges. “And the third parties are serving as the knowing receivers of that stolen content, which they have used to build their trillion dollar businesses.”

The company sells copies of the publishers’ content to third parties for training their A.I. models and products and informing responses to users, the suit alleges, in addition to making unauthorized copies of copyrighted works through its own browser, providing free access to paywalled content.

The lawsuit says Brave crawled and copied content from more than 30 billion webpages in its index without identifying itself or providing the owners of websites any mechanism to block its crawler, according to The News’s complaint.

In addition to selling stolen stories to other companies, Brave also has a web browser that provides paywalled copyrighted content to its users, according to the suits. Paywalls provide a critical source of revenue to news organizations as they seek to compete in an evolving news environment by producing quality, original content, noted Frank Pine, executive editor at Tribune Publishing and MediaNews Group.

The suits add to a growing pile of cases playing out across the country brought by news organizations and various owners of copyrighted content against tech giants alleging the wholesale theft of content used to train A.I. models. The News, The Times and other papers that filed suit Monday are also suing OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging similar conduct.

In one example detailed in the new lawsuit, a user prompted Brave’s A.I. feature known as “Ask Brave” to show them articles published that day in The News. The chatbot provided the titles of 35 articles that appeared in The News that day behind a paywalland asked, “would you like me to pull up the full text of any of these articles? If so, just tell me which one(s) and I’ll fetch the complete version.”

“AI giants are now desperate to avoid getting caught red-handed stealing news from publishers, so Brave Software is selling them a back door to the journalism they know they have no right to. Buying stolen goods secondhand doesn’t make them legitimate. Brave must be held responsible for laundering pirated reporting for the AI industry,” said Steven Lieberman, an attorney representing The News and its sister papers with Tribune Publishing in the suit.

The suit lists five legal claims, alleging Brave has committed direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement.

In a statement, Pine said the software company had made “a mockery of our intellectual property laws.”

“Brave, purportedly on behalf of its users but also on behalf of other more well-known AI companies, pillages the internet and resells its ill-gotten gains to anyone who will buy,” Pine said. “Then, proudly touting how it protects the privacy – read that as piracy – of its customers, it attempts to delete evidence of its misdeeds under its ‘Zero Data Retention’ policy.”

The News reached out to Brave Software, Inc., for comment. Anthropic and other A.I. companies accused of buying stolen content from Brave are not named as defendants in Monday’s lawsuits.

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