Brave sued by New York Times over AI content scraping
Updated
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What the Times alleges
The New York Times sued Brave on Monday in federal court in Manhattan. The paper claims the privacy-focused browser company scraped its copyrighted content and distributed it to customers. The suit names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as those customers.
The Times describes Brave as a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" for AI companies. The filing says Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages using a crawler it does not identify. According to the suit, that left publishers unable to block it.
Paywalls, ads and a second lawsuit
The complaint also targets a Brave browser feature that bypasses paywalls. It further points to the company blocking publishers' ads while selling its own.
Separately on Monday, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit. Both cases were brought in federal court in Manhattan. The Times has also sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims.
What the Times wants and where Brave stands
The Times seeks an injunction and damages. Brave, founded in 2015, has raised roughly $250 million to date, according to private-market trackers. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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