brave

The New York Times and several other publications sued Brave Software, alleging it unlawfully scraped their content to train AI and supplied it to companies like Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere, while also letting users bypass paywalls.

Note that Hermes Agent's web search defaults to the Nous Portal free tier (500 requests/month). Alternatives: DDGS (free, unlimited), SearXNG (self-hosted), Tavily/Exa (1000/month with full page reading), Brave (2000/month). Recommended combo: search with DDGS, read pages with Tavily, configure via ~/.hermes/config.yaml.