The New York Times and other outlets sue Brave browser over content scraping

Lawsuits against Brave

The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Brave on Monday — the company behind the privacy-focused browser, which has existed since 2015. According to the publisher, Brave scraped its copyrighted materials and unlawfully distributed them among clients whom the lawsuit names explicitly: Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. On the same day, Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel filed a separate but similar lawsuit; both cases were filed in the federal court in Manhattan.

The essence of the accusations

The New York Times, which has previously sued OpenAI and Perplexity on similar grounds, compares Brave to a 'supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen content' for AI companies. In the lawsuit, the company is described both as a 'robber appropriating publishers' content' and as an AI 'fence' selling it to third parties. According to the plaintiffs, Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages using an unspecified crawler that publishers cannot block. Separate complaints concern the browser's paywall-bypassing feature and the company's practices: while blocking publishers' ads, Brave sells its own. The Times is seeking an injunction and damages. Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Context

According to private market trackers cited by TechCrunch, Brave has raised approximately $250 million in fundingsince its founding in 2015. For the company, this is already a direct conflict with major media: The New York Times previously filed similar lawsuits against OpenAI and Perplexity, and the new case fits into a series of disputes between publishers and the AI industry over rights to training and search data.