Brave has not publicly responded to the complaint. The allegation that Brave uses an unidentified crawler to build an index of more than 30 billion web pages, and that publishers cannot block it, has not been tested in court. Perplexity's communications chief, Jesse Dwyer, dismissed the claims as disinformation. How the two suits will proceed, including whether they will be coordinated, is not yet clear.
Attorneys should watch whether courts accept the theory that a search index is itself infringing, separate from any model training. The paywall-circumvention claims under the DMCA could also become a template for other publishers. The case follows News Corp's July countersuit against Brave, which accused the company of reselling copyrighted journalism to AI developers. The Times has been litigating AI content use since December 2023, when it sued OpenAI and Microsoft in a case now part of consolidated proceedings in the same district. Any ruling on indexing or real-time retrieval here could shape those cases as well.