New York Times and others sue Brave browser over content scraping and paywall bypass

The New York Times, along with the Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel, have filed lawsuits against Brave Software, the maker of the Brave web browser, over allegations of unlawfully scraping copyrighted content and distributing it to AI companies, according to TechCrunch and The Verge.

The complaints claim Brave built an index of over 30 billion web pages using a crawler that publishers could not block, and that it provided access to this content to AI companies such as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. This index is said to be used for training AI models and responding to user queries.

The lawsuits also target Brave's browser feature that allows users to bypass publishers' paywalls without permission and its practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own ads, as reported by both outlets.

The New York Times likens Brave to a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" for AI companies and is seeking an injunction and damages through the federal court in Manhattan.

Brave, founded in 2015 and having raised approximately $250 million, has not been reported to have responded publicly to the lawsuits yet.