New York Times and Other Newspapers Sue Brave Over AI Scraping

The New York Times sued the maker of the Brave web browser on Monday, accusing it of copying the paper’s articles without permission and supplying them to artificial intelligence companies, TechCrunch and The Verge reported.

The Times complaint, filed in federal court in Manhattan, names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as customers of Brave’s data, according to TechCrunch. It calls Brave a supplier of “stolen” copyrighted material to AI firms, comparing it to a burglar and a “fence” at once. The paper says Brave assembled an index covering over 30 billion pages using an unidentified crawler, which leaves publishers unable to block it. It asks for an injunction and damages.

Three other papers (the New York Daily News, the Tribune in Chicago and Florida’s Orlando Sentinel) brought a separate suit in that court the same day, The Verge reported. It says Brave sells AI companies paid access to live content from its index, which they use to train models or answer user queries. TechCrunch reported that the Times suit also challenges a browser feature that bypasses paywalls, and Brave’s habit of blocking publishers’ ads while selling ads of its own.

A Times spokesperson, Graham James, told The Verge that Brave ignored repeated requests to stop what the paper considers infringement. Steven Lieberman, the lawyer for the other three publications, said that buying stolen goods secondhand does not make them legitimate.

The Verge reported that Brave, Anthropic, Mistral and Cohere did not immediately reply to its requests for comment. Perplexity’s communications chief, Jesse Dwyer, called the Times suit overpriced lawyering and dismissed its claims, in a statement quoted by The Verge. The allegations have not been tested in court.

The cases add to a series of copyright fights between news organizations and AI developers. TechCrunch noted that the Times has brought comparable claims against OpenAI and Perplexity.

Brave, founded in 2015, has raised roughly $250 million, according to private-market trackers cited by TechCrunch. It markets itself as a privacy-focused browser.