New York Times and Other Publishers Sue Brave Over Alleged Scraping for AI Companies
By James Dargan · · 1 min read
The New York Times has sued Brave, the privacy-focused browser company founded in 2015, alleging it scraped the newspaper’s copyrighted content and unlawfully supplied it to AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. The Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar suit on the same day. Both cases were brought in federal court in Manhattan.
The Times, which has also taken legal action against OpenAI and Perplexity over comparable claims, describes Brave as a supplier and distributor of stolen copyrighted material for AI firms. The complaint likens the company to both a burglar that takes publishers’ content and a fence that sells it on to third parties.
According to the suit, Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages using an unidentified crawler, preventing publishers from blocking it. The complaint also targets a Brave browser feature that circumvents paywalls, as well as the company’s practice of blocking publishers’ ads while selling its own.
The Times is seeking an injunction and damages. Brave, which has raised about $250 million according to private-market trackers, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
