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New York Times and Three Newspapers Sue Brave Over Alleged Content Scraping for AI Firms
The New York Times and the publishers of the Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed two lawsuits against Brave on November 2. They accuse the company of copying content into its search index and passing it on to AI customers.
The New York Times has sued Brave, the company known for its privacy-focused browser. According to TechCrunch, the newspaper accuses Brave of scraping copyrighted content and handing it to customers, which the suit names as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. On the same day, the publishers of the Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit.
What the plaintiffs allege
According to TechCrunch, the Times claims Brave scraped its copyrighted content and passed it to AI customers. The suit describes Brave as a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" for AI companies.
The plaintiffs also say Brave built an index of more than 30 billion pages using an unidentified crawler, so publishers cannot block it.
Brave acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI ‘fence’ that sells stolen content to third parties. - excerpt from The New York Times lawsuit, quoted by TechCrunch
Paywalls and ads
The suit also targets a Brave browser feature that bypasses paywalls. Another allegation is that Brave blocks publishers' ads while selling its own.
This means the dispute is not only about training models. It covers the whole chain: the search index, access for AI companies, and the behavior of the browser itself.
Another fight over AI content
TechCrunch notes that the Times has also sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar practices. Brave is about 11 years old and, according to private-market trackers, has raised roughly $250 million.
TechCrunch names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as Brave's customers, but does not say that any of them commented on the case. The allegations come from the lawsuit and have not yet been decided by a court.
What happens next
The Times is seeking an injunction and damages; TechCrunch does not give an amount. Brave did not immediately respond to TechCrunch's request for comment, so its position on the allegations is not yet known.
For Polish companies building products on third-party search APIs or web indexes, the case is a signal that the origin of content in such services may become the subject of legal disputes. For now, though, the proceedings are only at the beginning.
