The New York Times and a group of other publications have filed lawsuits against Brave Software, the company behind the privacy-focused Brave web browser, over alleged unlawful scraping of their content to train AI and a browser feature that lets users bypass paywalls. The suits were filed Monday in federal court in Manhattan, according to Reuters and TechCrunch.
The Times filed one lawsuit, while the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a separate, similar suit. The Times, which has already sued OpenAI and Perplexity over related claims, is seeking an injunction and damages.
What the Times alleges about Brave
According to the complaints, Brave built an index of more than 30 billion webpages using an unidentified crawler, leaving publishers unable to block it. The Times describes Brave as a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" for AI companies, saying it acts "both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties."
The suits name Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as AI companies that allegedly received access to Brave's index. Brave has also promoted a "Paywall blocker" feature in its browser, which the publishers say lets users read their articles without consent or compensation.
- Brave allegedly indexed over 30 billion webpages with an unidentified crawler
- The suit names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as AI customers of the index
- Publishers say Brave's paywall blocker bypasses their paywalls without permission
