The New York Times sued the privacy-focused web browser company Brave on Monday in federal court in Manhattan, alleging the company scraped copyrighted content and unlawfully distributed it to AI firms including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. The lawsuit describes Brave as a supplier and distributor of stolen content that built an index of over 30 billion web pages using an unidentified crawler while preventing publishers from blocking it. Separately on Monday, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit against Brave in the same court.
The New York Times, which has previously targeted OpenAI and Perplexity over similar copyright claims, accuses Brave of acting like both a burglar that misappropriates publisher content and an AI fence selling stolen material to third parties. Additionally, the legal action targets a Brave browser feature that bypasses paywalls, alongside the company's practice of blocking publishers' advertisements while selling its own ads. Founded in 2015, Brave has raised approximately $250 million to date, and The New York Times is seeking both an injunction and damages in the case.
This lawsuit matters because it expands ongoing legal battles between traditional media publishers and technology companies over unauthorized content scraping and the supply chains feeding artificial intelligence models.