New York Times Sues Brave Over Alleged Content Scraping

The New York Times and other outlets are suing Brave over alleged content scraping and paywall circumvention.

The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against Brave, an 11-year-old privacy-focused web browser company, alleging it scraped the outlet’s copyrighted content and unlawfully distributed it to customers including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, also targets a Brave browser feature that reportedly bypasses paywalls and the company’s practice of blocking publishers’ ads while selling its own. The New York Times likens Brave to a “supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content” for AI companies.

Separately, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit on Monday. The New York Times, which has also sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims, states Brave built an index of over 30 billion web pages using an unidentified crawler, preventing publishers from blocking it. Brave, founded in 2015, has raised approximately $250 million to date. The New York Times is seeking an injunction and damages.

This legal action highlights ongoing tensions between content creators and technology platforms regarding the use of copyrighted material for AI training and content distribution. The lawsuits suggest a growing focus on the methods used by web browsers and AI companies to access and utilize online content, particularly concerning paywalls and advertising models. Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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