New York Times Sues Brave for Selling Paywalled Content to AI Firms

The Times is escalating the legal confrontation over AI training data by targeting not just scraping, but the monetization pipeline—Brave's business model of licensing access to paywalled journalism directly to AI companies. This moves the fight beyond copyright into the economics of distribution: if browser vendors can become middlemen between publishers and AI labs, the traditional subscription model collapses faster than ad-blocking alone threatened. The lawsuit signals that legacy publishers are no longer willing to negotiate or litigate individual scraping; they're going after the infrastructure companies that make unauthorized data access profitable and scalable.